


Something for Nothing

by MaCall (misterpointy)



Series: Zreaks of Nature: A Post-Apocalyptic Fairytale [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anxiety, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Disability, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, For Science!, Gen, Minor Character Death, POV Original Female Character, POV Third Person Plural, Porn with Feelings, Present Tense, References to Leverage, Resolved Sexual Tension, Season/Series 02, Stealth Crossover, Virology, Wordcount: Over 80.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2018-11-05 18:03:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 86,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11018691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misterpointy/pseuds/MaCall
Summary: He can’t save youbetter than you do.—Caitlyn Siehl, “Death March”It’s been sixty-seven days since the zombie virus mutated from a latent waterborne pathogen into a deadly airborne strain that wiped out at least 97% of the human population. Atlanta belongs to the dead now, and Fort Benning isn’t an option. Lucy Orville doesn’t know what lies ahead or where she goes from here. All that she knows is how to survive in a hostile environment—and thrive.Sequel toLiving Dead Girl.





	1. Driven

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING** : THIS IS THE SECOND PART OF A SERIES. IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE FIRST PART, YOU WON’T HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON HERE. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK. **BEWARE**.
> 
> (1) Series title is a reference to _Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things_ (1972). Story and chapter titles are titles of songs by Rush.
> 
> (2) Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or undead, is purely coincidental.
> 
> * * *
> 
>   
>    
> 

**Once my heart beat and the world spun on its axis.**  
**Nothing wobbled. Nothing was uncertain.**  
**There was a house on a street with a smiling sky above.**  
**There were wars and rumors of wars. Mass extinctions.**  
**Yes, the occasional earthquake, tsunami, tornado.**  
**Yes, the occasional storm, the crying out, asking for attention;**  
**but now, everything quivers, restless and itching, waiting**  
**for the final signal, the shutdown, the last penetrating burst,**  
**the eyelids stuttering closed, the last breath exhaled, the soul unlit.**

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “A Narcissist’s Apocalypse”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 1**  
Driven

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

Lucy yawns and puts her feet on the dashboard as Nico steps on the gas and speeds up I-85 in her jeep. There’s black sparkly polish on her toenails from a pedicure her sister had to coax her into getting before the world went to hell in a handbasket, the lacquer cracking because she’s been living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland for almost two months now. Artificial wind blows through her frizzy brown hair and she shuts her pale gray eyes against the glare of the sun in the sky, cloudless and too blue.

It’s been sixty-seven days since the zombie virus mutated from a latent waterborne pathogen into a deadly airborne strain that wiped out at least 97% of the human population. Lucy has learned she’s immune to both strains of the virus and that her blood is the closest thing anybody has to a cure. Which causes more problems than it solves, because she can’t give enough blood to cure everyone all at once and she has no way to undo any damage the latent infection has already done.

Atlanta belongs to the dead now, and Fort Benning isn’t an option. Lucy doesn’t know what lies ahead or where she goes from here. All that she knows is how to survive in a hostile environment—and thrive.

“Hey.” Cath boops her shoulder with one finger. “You okay?”

Lucy sighs. “I don’t know,” she mumbles. “It’s been too quiet. I have a feeling that something horrible is going to happen.”

“Worse than a zombie apocalypse?” Nico deadpans.

Lucy cackles and covers her mouth with one hand to muffle the noise. “Okay,” she laughs into the hollow of her palm and holds up her other hand in mock surrender, “fair enough.”

It’s been a slow day. Since they don’t know where they’re going, they’ve been driving along the Interstate and siphoning gas from the abandoned cars on the highway. After they filled up all of the canisters they had, they started using smaller receptacles like empty plastic water bottles and buckets with airtight lids. It takes most of the morning for them to get clear of the city because those early hours are spent gathering supplies for their journey. T-Dog only has room for himself and a single passenger in his church van by noon, when they’ve left Fayetteville in their dust. Jacqui was reluctant to ride shotgun with him because of everything that happened at the C. D. C. two days ago, but all the other cars are full. Rick, Lori, Carl, Sophia, and Carol are riding in the two-door SUV that belonged to the Peletier family pre-apocalypse with a trunkful of camping gear. Dale is driving his RV with Andrea, Amy, Glenn, Morgan, Duane, and Shane crammed inside like sardines in a can. Lucy, Cath, Kate, and Nico are riding in Nico’s jeep hitched to Lucy’s solar-paneled teardrop of trailer with Cath’s mutt Harley and a corgi puppy named Romy in the backseat.

Daryl left his truck behind in the city and took Merle’s bike on the road instead. When they’re settled, he’s planning to convert the engine to run on something that isn’t fossil fuel. Maybe vegetable oil. It’s hard to keep his eyes on the highway ahead because he can’t stop thinking about what Lucy said. How she’s got it bad for him. How she doesn’t trust herself to have feelings for anybody. How he’s going to have to be the one who makes the first move if he wants anything to happen between them.

 _Ain’t no damn ifs, ands, or buts about it_ , Daryl thinks. _I got it bad for her, too_.

There’s a pileup on the highway where a truck driver must’ve gotten infected with the airborne strain of the virus and spontaneously amplified on the road, a truck crashed and overturned on one side of the road while the other cars sit abandoned with their front doors wide open like wings too heavy to take flight. Ironic, since the archer is wearing his own wings—the patch on the old biker jacket that he turned into a vest a while back. Daryl squints his eyes at the mess, scrutinizing, trying to see a way through it. Of course it doesn’t matter in the end because the RV breaks down before they can get anywhere.

“I said it,” Dale grumbles, “didn’t I say it a thousand times? We’re dead in the water.”

Shane has to suppress the urge to roll his eyes at the old man. “Problem, Dale?” he asks, keeping his voice mild.

“Oh,” Dale huffs, “just a small matter of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no hope of…” he eyes the truck on its side before he notices that everyone is side-eyeing him. “Okay,” he says and slumps his shoulders into a sheepish hunch, “that was dumb.”

Shane adjusts his grip on the semiautomatic rifle in his hands, one of the military-grade weapons Lucy found at the C. D. C. before it went kablooey. “If you can’t find a radiator hose out here—” he falters, unsure of how they can keep going without the RV. While they could just hotwire some of the abandoned cars, they’d need at least two large vehicles to replace the RV and that would make their somewhat limited fuel supply dwindle even faster.

Daryl, meanwhile, doesn’t waste any time looking for anything useful in the open trunk of the first car he sees. Lucy shuffles over and draws the machete he gave her to stab the decaying corpse sitting in the passenger seat in the head, just in case. When she looks over her shoulder and smiles at him shyly, his heart does the same funny stuttering thing it does every time he looks at her. Lucy’s a sexy librarian with a body like a pinup girl and a mind like a cleaver, and he still can’t believe he has a shot in hell with her. Daryl swallows hard and smiles back, hopeful. “There’s a whole bunch’a stuff we can find,” he mutters.

T-Dog nods. “I can siphon more fuel from these cars for a start,” he says.

“Maybe some water,” Carol says wistfully.

“Or food,” Glenn adds.

Lori frowns at them. “This is a graveyard,” she snaps. When everyone turns to look at her, startled by the harsh tone of her voice, she heaves a sigh and folds her arms tight across her chest. “I don’t know how I feel about this,” she says.

Nico offers reusable canvas grocery bags she repurposed for looting to Kate and Cath before she slings a few over her shoulder. “Get over yourself,” she says. “These people died, and that sucks, but they can’t use this stuff anymore. We can.” At that, she turns to look at her friend with her hands on her hips. “Lucy, you want all the car batteries and wheel weights, right?” she asks.

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “Yup,” she mumbles and pops the _p_ sound before she uses the handle of her cane to pull a suitcase off the roof of one car like a wrangler.

“What do you need car batteries and wheel weights for?” Glenn wants to know.

“There’s lead in them,” Lucy informs him. “I’ve been keeping as many shell casings as I can, and Kate has a bullet press she found. We’re going to run out of ammo eventually. Nico has to find a way to extract the lead and melt it down safely, but once she does…”

Glenn smiles at her, comprehension dawning. “We can make our own ammo,” he says, “that’s genius.”

Lucy shrugs. “I am what I am,” she deadpans.

Nico and Kate start collecting the batteries and lead wheel weights from the furthest cars first and working their way back to the convoy while Lucy and Cath fill canvas tote bags with all of the clothes, food, and other sundry items they can find. Rick takes a rifle out of the duffle bag from the sheriff’s department and stands guard in front of the broken-down RV. Shane goes to scavenge the cars further down the turnpike because he’s trying to keep his distance from Lori and Carl, who stay close to Carol and Sophia as they slowly make their way through the highway graveyard like a murder of crows. Dale hands a screwdriver to Glenn before he goes to see if the overturned truck has a hose big enough to replace his busted one. Andrea stays inside the RV with Amy while Morgan and Duane keep watch over the road ahead from the roof. T-Dog fills up the tanks of every car in the convoy and uses the empty canisters to siphon more gas from the abandoned cars. Jacqui sits on the steps of the RV and watches the clouds gathering in the afternoon sky.

Carol smiles as she pulls a soft red shirt out of a suitcase left in the trunk of silver hatchback. When she glances up and sees the look of disgust Lori is giving her as she holds the shirt against her chest, the smile on her face wilts like a flower that has been struggling to grow somewhere without sunlight for far too long. “Ed never let me wear nice things like this,” she murmurs, “and we’re going to need clothes.”

“Treat yourself,” Cath tells her with a saccharine bite in the warmth of her wide smile, “don’t let anyone make you feel bad about wanting to feel pretty in the apocalypse.”

Lori sighs and grabs a bulky flashlight out of the back of a truck before she turns and looks for her son. “Carl,” she calls out to him. “Always stay within my sight. Okay?”

Carol smiles at her daughter. “You too, Sophia,” she says.

Sophia nods and holds her doll close to her heart, but she’s too scared to stray far from her mother. After all, growing up with a father like Ed Peletier made her afraid of almost everything.

Lucy, meanwhile, bites her lip and wrinkles her nose at the stench of decay. There were bodies at the nursing home, but those corpses had only been left to rot long enough for blowflies to buzz in—a day at the most—and these bodies have been here rotting out in the open air for two months. It reeks to high heaven and no angel is coming to save her from the stink.

 _What fresh hell is this?_ she thinks as she tries not to toss her cookies by the side of the road. _These bodies are desiccated. Why does it smell like death and taxes?_

Daryl unscrews the broadhead from one of his arrows and uses the headless bolt shaft to pop open the fuel doors on the abandoned cars. T-Dog siphons the gas out of them while the archer looks around for Lucy, who’s leaning on the guardrail by the side of the highway with her cane tucked into the crook of her elbow. When she tilts her head sideways and starts undoing her braid, it occurs to him that he’s never seen her without her hair up. Of course once he starts thinking about that, Daryl can’t stop thinking about how good her hair smells. Like black cherries, wild and sweet.

There are no rules for post-apocalyptic dating. It’s not like he can take her to see a movie or ask her out to dinner, because movie theaters and restaurants are things of the past. Daryl has never been the guy who dates, anyway—he goes to bars, he has one-night stands, he doesn’t get attached. On the rare occasion that he had a serious girlfriend, Merle always came along to ruin everything.

Only now Merle is gone, so the only person who can ruin things between him and Lucy is him. It’s a scary thought, one that makes all the words he wants to say to her get stuck in his throat. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and takes his headless arrow out of his mouth to pop another fuel door open before he sneaks another glance at her over his shoulder and smiles because he catches her looking back at him.

 _I want to be with you_. It shouldn’t be so hard to say that out loud.

* * *

Shane returns to the RV with his duffle bag full of supplies and cocks his head to read the words on the side of the delivery truck in front of the RV. _Mountain Spring Water, Home & Office Delivery_. “Glenn,” he gloats with his grin audible in his voice once he opens the hatch, “were we short on water?”

Glenn frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing until he looks up from the hose clamps and sees the stacked crates full of five-gallon water bottles. “Hey,” he guffaws as Shane pops one lid open and gulps down the water before he lets it pour out in rivulets to wet his hair and soak through his t-shirt, “save me some!”

Nico almost drops the car battery she’s carrying back to the convoy at the sight of his shirt clinging to his abs. Shane catches her blatantly ogling him and smirks at her before he turns back to grin at Glenn. “It’s like being baptized, man,” he says.

Dale shakes his head at how much water is being wasted and turns around to look through his binoculars at the road behind them. Rick tilts his head to look through the scope of his rifle and he’s about to shoot a shambling zombie in the head before he sees the massive horde of the walking dead that’s headed their way.

“Oh, _Christ_ ,” he whispers.

Lucy grabs Cath and yanks her down behind one of the abandoned cars. _I knew it_ , she thinks. _I knew something horrible was going to happen_.

What she doesn’t know is that something horrible is about to happen to her.


	2. Here Again

**One must be so careful these days.**

T. S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 2**  
Here Again

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

Rick slings his rifle over his shoulder and hits the ground running. When he spots Lori, he opens his mouth to shout her name and stops himself before he brings the zombies down on them. “Lori!” he whispers urgently. “Get under the cars!”

Lori’s eyes go wide in fear at the sight of the zombie hoard shambling up the road behind him before she runs to grab Carol and take cover underneath a black van festooned with highway dust. Dale cowers on the roof of the RV with Morgan and Duane. Glenn doesn’t look up from the radiator hose until Shane grabs his sleeve and throws him under the RV like he’s dead weight. Nico crawls under the delivery truck full of spring water and Kate lines the bulky car batteries they collected up along one side to keep the zombies from stumbling upon her before she does the smarter thing and hides in the passenger seat of the truck itself. It’s hot as hell inside with the windows up, but at least the zombies won’t be able to smell her. Lucy tucks her cane in the crook of her elbow and hides Romy in the back of a pickup truck, pulling a tarp up over the corgi as Cath opens the backdoor of a station wagon and pats the backseat to coax her mutt inside.

“Carl!” Rick hisses. “Sophia! Get down now!”

Sophia holds onto her doll as she crawls under one of the abandoned vehicles. Carol whimpers and Lori has to cover her mouth to stop her from screaming for her daughter. Sophia trembles in the shade and glances wildly at the shadows in the street.

T-Dog panics and slashes his forearm so deeply that blood spurts all over his shirt and onto the highway while he huffs and puffs up the road in a doomed attempt to outrun the zombies. Daryl follows the fresh spatter and finds him on the verge of passing out from blood loss. Ironic, given everything that happened with Merle. T-Dog flinches as Daryl uses his headless arrow to kill a zombie that was about to sniff his ass out because the redneck tried to kill him a few days ago, and Rick isn’t here to hold a gun to his head. There’s nothing to stop the archer from taking his revenge now.

Only that’s not what happens. Daryl narrows his eyes at the scared look on his face and holds one finger to his lips. “Shh,” he hisses and drags him by his feet until T-Dog is flat on his back in the dirt. Then he dumps the body of the zombie he killed on top of him before he grabs another corpse by the neck and uses its stench of decay to mask his scent.

Amy grabs a flathead screwdriver from the bag of tools stashed under the table and grips its handle hard enough to make her knuckles go white and bloodless while Andrea stops cleaning her gun and tries to put it back together with shaking hands. When a zombie shambles up the steps into the RV with an ominously low moan, Andrea scrambles to hide in the bathroom and tries to drag her sister with her. Amy shakes her off and screams the battle cry of a banshee as she drives the flathead through its dead eye over and over until the zombie stops moving. Andrea kicks the corpse down the steps hard enough that blood splatters on her shoes and slams the door of the RV shut. Amy exhales a loud gasp that shudders through her whole body and grins at her sister in spite of the gore on her face and in her hair. Andrea grins back and shakes her head as she slumps against the door.

“I don’t know how I would do this without you,” she whispers.

After the horde shambles through and a hush falls over the highway, something goes horribly wrong. Sophia tries to crawl out from under one of the abandoned cars and is chased into the forest by the side of the road. Carol muffles a scream in the hollow of her palm and trembles helplessly in the shadows while Lori keeps her quiet with shaking hands. Rick leaves his sheriff’s hat and his rifle on the roadway and rushes in like a fool to save her.

Nobody sees Lucy run into the forest.

Nobody knows that she’s gone until it’s too late.

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Lucy finds Sophia under a tree by the creek screaming for Rick as a zombie tries to get at her through a tangle of gnarled roots. _Okay_ , she thinks as she draws her machete with a loud wheeze and stabs the zombie in the back of the head until it stops moving and flops into the water, _I am never running again_.

Sophia drops her doll in the creek. It floats away as she runs to Lucy and clings to her, shaking like a leaf. “I was so _scared_ ,” she wails. “There were two of them and Rick wouldn’t shoot them and he…he left me here…”

Lucy is eternally grateful her boots are tall enough that she won’t be walking around in wet socks, because she can’t get Sophia to let go and get out of the water. _I don’t think I’ve ever heard her talk so much_ , she thinks. “Rick was just trying to protect you,” she mutters, “and I won’t leave you. I promise.”

Apparently those were the words the little girl needed to hear, because Sophia hugs her so hard the librarian makes a soft noise that sounds like _oof_ before she finally lets her go. Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips and uses her cane to climb out of the creek. Sophia follows her timidly to the other side.

“Rick told me to run back to the highway,” Sophia tells her softly, “he said I should keep the sun on my left shoulder.”

Lucy stops and listens to the sound of low moans echoing ominously through the trees. “Okay,” she mumbles, “but we might have to run the other way.”

“Why?” Sophia wants to know.

Lucy shrugs and keeps trying to look everywhere at once because she can’t forget how dangerous this new world is. Not if she wants to survive. “Um…” she ekes the _mm_ sound out awkwardly, “because the horde must’ve heard you screaming and they might’ve followed you into the woods.”

Sophia whimpers and her lip trembles like she’s about to start crying all over again. After everything she’s been through, any twelve-year-old girl would fall apart. It’s human nature.

Lucy still winces at the shrill noise and sighs. “Okay,” she huffs and stretches the _oh_ sound out into a soft _ooh_. “Let’s face it: this new world is a freaking horror movie that never ends and that’s not going to change. There won’t always be someone to run into the woods and save you from the monsters. I know you’re scared, but you’re not going to survive if you don’t learn how to save yourself. Okay?”

Sophia nods and bites her bottom lip to stop her mouth from trembling again. “Okay,” she whispers.

* * *

Daryl crouches down to look in the tangle of roots by the side of the creek before he turns to squint over his shoulder at the former sheriff. “You sure this is the spot?” he asks with a sharp edge of skepticism in his Southern drawl.

Rick exhales a frustrated noise through his noise and sloshes into the water to gesticulate at the hollow beneath the gnarled old tree. “I left her right here,” he says firmly. “I drew the zombies off in that direction, up the creek—”

Daryl snorts. “Without a paddle,” he deadpans. “Seems that’s where we’ve landed.”

Cath has to cover her mouth to muffle a giggle at that. Daryl narrows his eyes at her as one corner of his lips unfurls into a crooked smile. It’s nice to know he can make Lucy’s best friend laugh.

“Sophia was gone by the time I got back here,” Rick clarifies, “I figured she just took off and ran back to the group. I told her to head back to the highway and keep the sun on her left shoulder.”

“Yeah,” Shane mutters under his breath, “assuming she knows her left from her right.”

“Shane, she understood me fine,” Rick says.

“Kid’s tired and scared, man,” Shane retorts, “and she had a close call with two zombies. Gotta wonder how much of what you said stuck.”

“Got clear prints right here,” Daryl says gruffly, “she did like you said, headed back t’ the highway. Let’s spread out, make our way back.”

“Okay,” Rick says, “she couldn’t have gone far.”

“Hey, we’re gonna find her,” Shane murmurs, “odds are she’s tuckered out hiding in a bush somewhere.”

“This is the apocalypse,” Cath points out, “the odds are never in our favor.”

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

Rick sends Cath and Shane back to where the others are waiting on the highway while he and Daryl try to track Sophia down. Glenn and Dale are still repairing the radiator and everybody but Carol has kept themselves busy either by moving cars, or helping Nico extract lead sheeting from the bulky car batteries so they won’t have to carry them around. Morgan uses the Peletier’s jeep to push the other cars down onto the slice of grass and weeds in between the roadway with Duane riding shotgun while Andrea, Amy, Lori and Carl scavenge the cars further down the turnpike.

Carol is standing with her shoulders hunched by the side of the road looking lost without her daughter before she turns to look at Dale. “Why aren’t we all out there looking?” she asks him. “Why are we moving cars?”

“We have to clear enough room so I can get the RV turned back around as soon as it’s running,” Dale explains. “We can double back to a bypass that Glenn flagged on the map.”

Shane adjusts his grip on the semiautomatic rifle in his hands and nods curtly. “Yeah,” he says, “going back’s gonna be easier than trying to get through this mess.”

Carol glares at him with a flare of ferocity that she didn’t even know she had. “We’re not going anywhere ’til my daughter gets back,” she snaps.

Lori reaches out to give her shoulder a squeeze. “Hey,” she says in what she hopes is a soothing voice, “that goes without saying.”

Shane nods again, a sharp descent of his chin. “Look,” he says, “Rick and Daryl are doing everything they can to find your little girl. Okay? It’s just a matter of time.”

“Can’t be soon enough for me,” Andrea cuts in before she takes a long swig from her water bottle.

Amy folds her arms loosely across her chest and frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “I’m still freaked out from the herd that passed us by,” she adds, “or whatever you’d call it.”

“Yeah,” Glenn says as he fidgets with the brim of his baseball cap. “What was that? All of them just marching along like that…”

“Lucy calls them hordes,” Kate tells him, “she thinks the virus lets the body decay because it can infect the bacteria and create a protein that it uses to communicate with other hosts. When the zombies are walking around in a pack like that, it means the viral phages are talking to each other.”

“Yeah,” Shane mutters, “that sounds about right. We’ve seen it.”

“Like the night our camp at the quarry was attacked,” Nico murmurs as comprehension dawns. _I guess we can tell Lucy that her hypothesis isn’t so hypothetical anymore_ , she thinks.

“Yeah.” Shane hums in agreement. “Like a wandering pack. Only fewer,” he says and grins at her before he catches Lori watching them in his periphery. “Okay!” he clears his throat awkwardly. “Come on, people. We still got a lot to do.”

* * *

Rick and Daryl return at dusk as the daylight burns out in the gloaming sky above the highway. Nobody has seen any sign of Lucy since the shambling horde passed through, but they all just assumed she went to hide in her trailer and that at some point one of her friends went to check on her. Of course that isn’t what happened. Lucy is lost in the forest like a girl in a fairytale. Only her friends don’t know that. Yet.

“Oh god,” Glenn says as they climb over the guardrail and walk back onto the turnpike, “they’re back.”

Carol scrambles to see if her daughter is with them and whimpers because Sophia is nowhere to be seen. “You didn’t find her?” she whispers.

Rick slumps his shoulders in a doomed attempt to shrug off the feeling of failure and helplessness coiling in his gut like a venomous snake. “No,” he says, “her trail went cold. We’ll pick it up again at first light.”

Carol shakes her head so fast she almost discombobulates herself. “You can’t leave my daughter out there to spend the night alone in the woods,” she whispers.

Daryl squints at her in the faded light and shakes his head slowly. “Out in the dark’s no good,” he tells her softly. “We’d just be trippin’ over ourselves. More people’d get lost.”

Carol whimpers again. “But she’s twelve,” she wails, “she can’t be out there on her own. You…” she sucks in a sharp breath and turns to look at Rick, wide-eyed and scared out of her mind. “You didn’t find anything?”

“I know this is hard,” Rick says gravely, “but I’m asking you not to panic. We know she was out there.”

Daryl nods, brusquely. “We tracked her for a while,” he adds.

Rick turns to look at the rest of the group—they’re exhausted, covered in dirt and dust, and they’re looking at him like he’s their last chance. “We have to make the search an organized effort,” he says. “Daryl knows the woods better than anybody. I’ve asked him to oversee this.”

“Wait,” Carol narrows her eyes at Daryl, “is…is that blood?”

“We took down a zombie,” Rick explains and heaves a sigh because Carol does the opposite of what he said before and starts to panic. “There was no sign it was ever anywhere near Sophia,” he tells her urgently.

“Okay,” Nico says as Lori wraps one arm loosely around Carol and squeezes her shoulder as she tries to calm her down, “how can you know that?”

“We cut the sumbitch open,” Daryl says gruffly, “made sure.”

Carol glares at the former sheriff as the pulse of panic in her chest becomes a bright fume of rage. “How could you just leave her out there to begin with?” she wants to know. “How could you just leave her?”

“There were two zombies on us,” Rick desperately tries to explain, “I had to draw them off. It was her best chance.”

Shane goes to back him up before he thinks it through. Rick is still his best friend. No matter what else has happened. “Sounds like he didn’t have a choice,” he says.

“How is she supposed to find her way back on her own?” Carol sobs. “Sophia is just a child, Rick…she’s just a child…”

Rick swallows thickly and falls to his knees in front of her because he’s begging her forgiveness now. “It was my only option,” he says in a hushed voice. “It was the only choice I could make.”

“I’m sure no one doubts that,” Shane mutters.

Daryl scoffs at that and turns to scrutinize the other people crowded around the guardrail. There’s someone else missing—the only person in this group that he gives a damn about. “Where is she?” he asks sharply.

Rick frowns in confusion and turns to look at him. “What?”

Daryl growls low in his throat and exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Where the hell is Lucy?” he snarls.


	3. Finding My Way

**I looked at all the trees and didn’t know what to do.**  
**A box made out of leaves.**  
**What else was in the woods? A heart, closing.**

Richard Siken, “Detail of the Woods”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 3**  
Finding My Way

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Lucy and Sophia run into Jacqui on their way back to the highway. There isn’t time to talk about why they’re all lost in the forest after dark because the horde is shambling through the trees. Not until they’re about a mile up the other side of the creek without a paddle. Lucy is feeling the burn in the muscles of her legs and a telltale ache in her inflammatory ankle with every hobbling step she takes and every move she makes.

“What happened?” Jacqui asks. “Why’d she run off into the woods?”

Lucy stops to wheeze and frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing. “Wait,” she says sharply, “you didn’t see the horde on the road?”

Jacqui says nothing, but awkward silence can speak louder than words.

Lucy sighs and lets Sophia link arms with her so the little girl won’t get lost again. “You didn’t come looking for Sophia,” she deduces. “You came out here to die.”

“You don’t understand,” Jacqui whispers.

“I understand better than you think,” Lucy retorts. “I tried to kill myself once. When I was thirteen.”

Sophia looks at her, wide-eyed. Jacqui looks at her, sidelong and horrifyingly sad. “Why didn’t you?” she wants to know.

Lucy shrugs. “I wasn’t finished,” she mumbles. “I’m still not finished.” Then she unlinks her left arm from Sophia and draws the machete that Daryl gave her in one smooth movement, until the sharp edge of the blade kisses Jacqui’s throat. “I know the hardest thing in this world is to live in it,” she tells her in a voice that slices through the shadows like a serrated knife, “but we’re lost in the woods with a twelve-year-old girl and I won’t let your deathwish get us all killed. I know you think you can’t live in this new world, but I think you’re wrong. Duane would’ve died if you hadn’t let T-Dog talking you into staying alive. Morgan couldn’t do what had to be done.”

Jacqui swallows thickly. “I could,” she whispers. “I did.”

Lucy ducks her head in a nod. “It’s okay if you’re finished, Jacqui,” she murmurs. “If you tell me that you’re finished, I’ll slit your throat. It’ll take you seconds to bleed out. I don’t think you’ll feel much pain and I won’t let you end up like Jim.”

Jacqui sobs at the sound of his name. Sophia whimpers at the memory of the man who died by the side of the road before they changed the world.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and forces herself to look Jacqui in the eyes. “You don’t have to live for yourself,” she points out. “You can live for Duane, for Morgan, for your sister. I don’t give a crap. I just need you to make a choice. Right now,” she bites down around the words as a low moan floats ominously through the obvoluted leaves above their heads, “live or die. Right now, Jacqui!”

Jacqui sets her jaw and smacks the machete away. It’s gentle, as smacks go, but she’s made her choice—and that’s all that matters.

Lucy smiles at her as she slips the best belated birthday present ever back into its sheath and lets Sophia link arms with her again. “Good choice,” she mumbles. “Let’s go.”

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

Daryl stomps over to her trailer and bangs on the door so hard the solar panels shake. There’s a sense of unease snarling deep in his gut and gnawing at him like some wild animal. _Lucy can’t be lost_ , he thinks. _I lost my damn brother ’cause of Rick. I ain’t gonna lose her, too_. “Lucy!” he shouts, not caring if the shambling horde can hear him. “You in here?”

“Lucy’s given five units of blood in the last three days,” Amy points out, “she could just be sleeping that off.”

Nico glances at Cath before she goes to deactivate the weaponized joy buzzer and open the door. “Wasn’t she with you?” she asks as Daryl stomps up the steps into the trailer.

Cath shakes her head slowly. “I saw her put Romy in the back of a truck,” she tilts her head at the puppy whose leash is looped tight around her wrist, “and I thought she was hiding in the passenger seat, but she wasn’t—”

Daryl stomps out of the trailer and slams the door shut with a loud bang that resonates with enough force to rattle teeth in their skulls. “This is your fault!” he snarls at Rick and jabs his finger in his face to make his point. “If anythin’ happens to that little girl, it’s on you. If anythin’ happens to Lucy…” he adjusts his grip on the strap of his crossbow slung over his shoulder and narrows his eyes at the former sheriff until they’re nothing but angry feral slits, “...anythin’ happens to her, I’ll kill you.”

Shane adjusts his grip on his semiautomatic and moves to stand by Rick, to back him up. Morgan does the same. Dale follows, then Glenn. T-Dog is too woozy to stand up, but he has no idea whose side he’s on anymore. Lori stays on the guardrail with her arm around Carol, but she glares at Daryl with all the viciousness of a woman who has almost lost everything.

Rick sighs and squares the hunch out of his shoulders before he looks the archer in the eyes. “If anything happens to them, I won’t stop you,” he says gravely.

Kate clears her throat awkwardly. “No one is dying tonight,” she says, biting down on the consonant. “Nothing bad is going to happen to Lucy.”

“How in the hell could you possibly know that?” Lori asks.

Kate gives the housewife a caustic smile and taps her earpiece. “I heard it on my radio,” she deadpans.

* * *

_Thursday, 19 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 67._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Lucy is too freaked out to remember that she put her earpiece in one of the many pockets on her ginormous backpack until they’re in the dark heart of the woods hiding in a tent abandoned by people who thought going camping in the zombie apocalypse was a great idea. Sophia falls asleep on top of the sleeping bag while the librarian inventories everything in her backpack. “Okay,” she says, “I have my cane, my listography notebook, two full bottles of water, six cans of Dr. Pepper, a bag of sunflower seeds, two cheese sandwiches, two peanut butter sandwiches, a bag of goldfish crackers, two rolls of toilet paper, travel shampoo and conditioner, a book on tourism in Atlanta that includes a guide to local plants that are safe to eat, a Zippo lighter that looks like an alligator is watching you that I stole from a gas station, a vinyl Unicorno collectible named Kaijucorno that’s both a unicorn and a dragon, a pocketknife that’s also a bottle opener and a pair of tiny scissors, a first-aid kit, a two-way radio earpiece, a machete, two .38 special revolvers, and a hundred and twelve bullets.”

Jacqui takes the revolver Lucy offers to her. “I can’t tell if you’re overprepared or just lucky,” she says as she clips the holster to one of the belt loops on her jeans and checks the chambers to see if they’re all full.

Lucy shrugs with one shoulder hunching birdlike to meet her earlobe. “I’m an overthinker,” she says. “Hope for the best. Plan for the worst. Also, I was too lazy to unpack my bag after we left the C. D. C. because the building went kablooey.”

“You were trying to cure the virus,” Jacqui says. “I wouldn’t call that lazy.”

Lucy shrugs again, cocking her head owlishly into the motion. “I can be lazy and brilliant,” she retorts, “‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’”

“‘Who wishes to walk with me?’” Jacqui murmurs. “‘Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?’”

Lucy snorts. “‘I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, but I do not talk of the beginning or the end,’” she quotes back. “‘All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed.’ It’s never too late to change, Jacqui,” she whispers before she puts her earpiece in. “It’s never too late to try.”

Jacqui swallows thickly and nods as she turns her earpiece on.

Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm before she speaks. “Okay,” she says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ , “Ground Control to Major Tom. Your circuit’s dead. There’s something wrong.”

Kate exhales a sigh of sheer relief that moves through her whole body. “No one is going to die tonight,” she says. “Nothing bad is going to happen to Lucy.”

Lucy frowns, the space between her eyebrows furrowing into a wrinkle again. _What the hell did I miss?_ she thinks.

“How in the hell could you possibly know that?” Lori asks.

“I heard it on my radio,” Kate deadpans. “Nico, do you still have those iPod speakers?”

Nico grabs the speakers out of the glove compartment in her jeep and plugs the headphone jack into the apparatus of the earpiece. “Lucy,” she says to the speakers. “You okay?”

Lucy ducks her head in a nod before she remembers that her friends can’t see what she’s doing. Whoops. “I can’t stay on the radio for long or the battery is going to die, but I’m fine,” she says, “and you can tell Carol that Sophia is fine.”

Carol shrugs off the arm Lori had around her shoulders and scrambles over to the speakers. “Let me talk to her,” she whispers.

Lucy shakes her head slowly. “I don’t want to wake her up,” she yawns and pops the _p_ sound awkwardly, “but she’s totally fine, she’s just exhausted.”

“Sounds like you’re exhausted,” Shane mutters.

Lucy rolls her eyes at him even though she knows he can’t see it. “I killed six zombies and walked at least two miles,” she informs him, “and I ran today. I’m crippled and I have DD-cup tits. I don’t run, but I ran today. I ran down a hill and up a creek so I am indeed exhausted. Thank you, Deputy Obvious.”

Daryl snorts at that and tries not to start thinking about her polka-dot bra again. Or the see-through black lace one he saw hanging on the clothesline strung up inside her trailer. Or the red one trimmed and variegated with strips of black silk ribbon. Or the matching pairs of panties. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as heat crawls up the back of his neck. It doesn’t matter what she’s wearing, or not wearing—because just hearing her disembodied voice on the radio is enough to calm him down and make him feel so much better than he did before. _I need to find her_ , he thinks, _and then I ain’t never lettin’ her outta my sight_.

“Why didn’t you just come back to the highway?” Rick wants to know.

Lucy yawns. “Um,” she ekes the _mm_ sound out before she answers his question, “because the horde of zombies that was on the highway is now in the woods. No lost girls are going to get eaten by the living dead, though. Jacqui found an empty tent, so we’re safe for tonight.”

“Jacqui’s with you?” T-Dog slants a glare at Morgan. “I thought you were keeping an eye on her.”

Morgan narrows his eyes at the other man. “I thought she went off into the woods because the bathroom in the RV was occupied,” he murmurs. “I didn’t think she would get lost.”

Jacqui doesn’t tell him that she went off into the woods to die because that’s more of a face-to-face conversation, and it’s something that she doesn’t want Duane to overhear.

“T-Dog, you don’t need to worry,” Lucy tells him softly, “and neither does Morgan. Jacqui’s fine, I’m fine, Sophia’s fine, we’re all fine, so don’t worry…” she muffles her umpteenth yawn in the hollow of her palm and squirms to lay down on top of another sleeping bag, “…I’ll radio you guys in the morning,” she mumbles sleepily. “Goodnight.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

Rick wakes everyone up bright and early to being the search for their lost girls. Carl found a small arsenal of bladed weapons in a pickup truck and pried it out of the cold, dead hands of the corpse in the driver’s seat. Rick splays them out on top of the Peletier’s jeep. “Everybody takes a weapon,” he says.

Andrea puts a hand on her hip and cocks her head. “These aren’t the kind of weapons we need,” she says.

“No,” Kate tells her. “These are exactly the kind of weapons we need. No more wasting our bullets.”

Nico folds her arms loosely across her sternum and nods. “Not until we find a way to make more ammo,” she adds.

“What about the guns?” Amy wants to know.

Shane narrows his dark eyes at her and squints at the Harrison sisters in the harsh daylight. “Well,” he says, “your sister is gonna stay here with you and guard the convoy with that gun of hers. Think you two can handle that?”

Amy nods. Andrea lets one corner of her lips unfurl into a smile as she arches her eyebrows at him like a challenge. “I know we can,” she says.

Daryl adjusts his grip on the strap of his crossbow slung over his shoulder and clears his throat awkwardly. “Okay,” he says gruffly, “the idea is t’ take the creek up about five miles, turn around and come back down the other side. Chances are they’ll stay by the creek. It’s their only landmark.”

Carol is too worried about her daughter to take a weapon for herself. Glenn shuffles over to grab the citrus peeler—a long blade that curves from blunt corners into a wickedly sharp hook. Morgan hands a hatchet to Duane and doesn’t take anything for himself. Cath keeps her knitting needles in their holster while Nico draws her knife to reflexively check the blade for residue and puts it back in the sheath clipped to her belt.

“Okay,” Rick says, “stay quiet and stay sharp. Keep space between you, but always stay within sight of each other. Dale, you keep going on those repairs. We’ve got to get this RV ready to move.”

“We won’t stay here a minute longer than we have to,” Dale murmurs and reaches out to clap the former sheriff on the shoulder before he adds, “good luck out there. Bring them back.”


	4. Madrigal

**When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.**

George A. Romero

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 4**  
Madrigal

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

While the viral phages have gotten smart enough to reprogram the genetic codes of the bacteria in their decomposing hosts so they can talk to each other, the hordes aren’t smart enough to use ambush tactics in the wild. Yet. After the zombies shambled into the woods they split into smaller packs and then into lone stragglers, like parasitic cells trying to divide and conquer. Daryl puts arrows in eyes of any zombies he sees before the others have a chance to use their weapons and keeps walking.

There’s an inevitable undercurrent of tension fulminating between Lori and Shane, and Carl keeps getting stuck in the middle of their breakup drama. Rick isn’t giving any obvious indication that he knows what was going on between his best friend and his wife before he came back from the dead, but it shows in the subtle tightness woven into the line of his shoulders and in the way he wears his sheriff’s uniform like nostalgic armor—like he wishes that everything could go back to how it was before the world went to hell in a handbasket.

It’s hot as hell in the forest in spite of the shade from the trees, the humid air sizzling into an incandescent swelter that makes them all sweat through the fabric of their shirts. Lori has been wearing the same bra for two weeks because she was too squeamish to wash her underwear in front of everyone. If she doesn’t find a way to do laundry soon, heads are going to roll. Shane is looking surly in a black t-shirt and khakis with his semiautomatic rifle in his hands and a pack slung over his shoulder. Carol is wearing a beige knitted lace sweater that looks more decorative than anything else on top of a loose floral print sleeveless shirt and slate gray slacks. Morgan and Duane haven’t done laundry in over a month, so they’re wearing new clothes they stole from a store on the outskirts of Atlanta: a button-up cotton shirt with a stiff collar over a t-shirt and brown khaki pants for Morgan and a long-sleeved henley over green cargo pants for Duane.

Glenn left his baseball cap in the RV and wore a V-neck raglan on top of a pair of chinos into the woods. Cath and Nico are both dressed to kill the undead in faded jeans, soft t-shirts, ass-kicking boots, and survivalist arm guards made out of tape: glittery purple duct tape from a craft store they looted in Fayetteville for Cath and shiny black electrical tape for Nico. Daryl is wearing a pair of dark jeans with holes worn in the legs, a blue shirt with the sleeves cut off and a few of the buttons undone, and hunting boots. There are no wings on his back today.

When he sees a yellow tent pitched in a cluster of spindly trees, Daryl gets his hopes up even though he knows he shouldn’t. If anything seems too good to be true, then it probably is.

“They could be in there,” Shane whispers.

Daryl crouches to nock an arrow and squints at the tent in a futile attempt to see a silhouette through the walls. “Yeah,” he mutters, “could be a whole bunch’a things in there.”

Carol exhales a quiet, shuddering breath and squares away the hunch in her shoulders. “Sophia,” she calls out, “sweetie, are you in there? It’s Mommy. Sophia, we’re all here, baby. It’s Mommy.”

“Wait,” Cath murmurs and frowns until her wide brown eyes narrow into slits, “that can’t be the right tent. Lucy wouldn’t leave it open like that.”

Daryl puts his loaded crossbow down in the dirt and unsheathes his hunting knife before he wordlessly gives the others a signal to stay out of his way. There’s a dead body with its face blown off in the tent, a fresh one judging by the stench of decay that seeps out through the open tent flap the second he steps inside. Daryl swallows hard at the sight of the maggots eating the rotten meat of the dead guy’s face and grabs the Colt Detective Special he used to kill himself out of his hand. It’s the same caliber as the revolvers Lucy carries, .38 special. Daryl clenches his jaw and makes sure the safety is on before he tucks it under the waistband of his pants to carry it at the small of his back. After he steps out through the flap, he grabs his crossbow and slings it over his shoulder. “It ain’t them,” he says gruffly, “this ain’t the right tent.”

“What’s in there?” Nico wants to know.

“Some guy who did what Jenner said,” Daryl mutters, “opted out. Ain’t that what he called it?”

Cath looks up wide-eyed at the heavens as the sound of church bells clamors and clangs through the woods and scrambles to catch up with everyone as they start running like the devil is behind them.

“What direction?” Shane asks.

Rick keeps his Colt drawn in one hand and gesticulates with the other. “I think that way,” he huffs. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Damn,” Shane gripes, “it’s hard to tell out here.”

“Someone’s ringing those bells,” Glenn points out. “Maybe calling others.”

“Or it’s our girls trying to give us a sign,” Carol says hopefully.

Nico shakes her head so fast she almost discombobulates herself. “Lucy wouldn’t do that,” she retorts. “Not without using the radio to tell us they found a church.”

Rick grits his teeth around a frustrated noise and starts to run faster. “Come on!” he shouts over his shoulder. “Let’s go!”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_Southern Baptist Church of Holy Light._

* * *

Lucy has never believed in God, but Cath always has—she went to church every Sunday pre-apocalypse, she got her English degree from a religious college where the unofficial motto was _A Ring by Spring or Your Money Back_ , and she was a virgin until her wedding night. It breaks her heart a little to see a church abandoned, but seeing the sign out front that reads _Welcome, Bikers!_ makes her giggle.

Shane glances up and scowls as the early morning sunlight glares down at him from above. “This can’t be it,” he says, “it’s got no steeple, no bells.”

Morgan glances at him as Rick sprints at a dead run through a graveyard to get to the church on time. Shane heaves a sigh before he sprints after the former sheriff, looking back at the rest of the group over his shoulder every few steps as they run to catch up. Cath opens the pair of red doors and stands back as the others step inside.

There are three zombies seated in the pews: two hollow men in overalls and a dead woman with a delicately rotting lace veil over her decomposing face. Lori hands Rick the blade she took out of the arsenal Carl found and winces as her husband splits the skull of the more skeletal male zombie with it and keeps chopping even after it stops trying to take a bite out of him. Shane, meanwhile, stabs the other male zombie through its eye and lets it drop before he bashes its skull in with brutal force. Cath gores the female zombie with one of her wickedly sharp knitting needles and steps back primly to avoid getting any splatter on her clothes.

Daryl narrows his eyes at the effigy of Jesus Christ dying on the cross in his crown of thorns. “Yo, J. C.,” he deadpans, “you takin’ requests?”

“Sophia!” Rick shouts desperately.

“I’m telling you,” Shane says, “this is the wrong church. It’s got no steeple, Rick. There’s no steeple—”

Then, as if to prove him dead wrong, the bells clamor and clang all over again. Daryl shoves Glenn out of his way and shoots down the church steps before he careens around the corner, but he stops once he sees the speaker on the wall. “It’s on a timer,” he snarls as Glenn breaks open the fuse box to shut it off. “It’s on a damn timer.”

Carol exhales a quiet mournful sound that slumps her shoulders and moves through her chest. “I’m going back in for a bit,” she whispers.

Daryl clenches his teeth around a frustrated noise because he would’ve lost all his faith in God a long time ago if he’d ever had any faith to lose to begin with, and staying here to pray when they could be out looking for the girls is a waste of time.

Morgan goes to sweep the perimeter with Daryl, Glenn, Duane and Carl while Rick prays and Lori confronts Shane because he told her that he was going to leave as soon as their lost girls are safe and sound. Cath walks back inside the church and sits in the pew beside Carol. Nico, who doesn’t believe in God, sits and waits outside with her back against the wall. When she tries to hear something on her radio, static fizzles on the other end.

“I’m trying to make this easier,” she overhears Shane whispering harshly to Lori, “this ain’t easy on any of us, least of all me. I’m the one who loses you.”

Nico snorts and idly twists her engagement ring around her finger. It feels so heavy, all of a sudden.

* * *

“Father, forgive me,” Carol murmurs. “I don’t deserve your mercy. I prayed for safe passage from Atlanta, and you provided. I prayed for Ed to be punished for laying his hands on me, and for looking at his own daughter with whatever sickness was growing in his soul. I prayed you’d put a stop to it, give me a chance to raise her right, help her not make my mistakes.”

Cath reaches out to take her hand as she chokes back the sting of tears. Carol exhales a shuddering breath and squeezes her fingers as Lori moves to sit on her other side and puts an arm around her trembling shoulders.

“Sophia is so fearful,” she whispers in a fervent hush, “she’s so young in her way, and she hasn’t had a chance. I know praying for Ed’s death was a sin. Please don’t let this be my punishment. Please let her be safe, alive and safe. Please, Lord…punish me however you want, but show mercy on her.”

* * *

Nico waits for Lori to stomp up the steps of the church in a huff before she makes herself known to Shane. “I don’t think you should go,” she tells him.

Shane exhales a disgruntled noise through his nose. “What?” he snaps.

Nico folds her arms and arches her eyebrows at him like a challenge. “You heard me,” she says, bold as brass, “don’t go.”

Shane adjusts his grip on his semiautomatic and holds her gaze for a few seconds too long before he goes to talk to Rick in hushed tones.

“This means something,” Rick tells him desperately, “finding them would be the miracle we need.”

Shane heaves a sigh and turns back around to find the others watching them and waiting. “Y’all are gonna follow the creek back,” he says. “Daryl, you’re in charge. Rick and I, we’re just gonna hang back and search this area another hour or so, just to be thorough.”

Daryl squints at him, scrutinizing. “You’re splittin’ us up,” he mutters skeptically. “You sure?”

Shane nods curtly. “Yeah,” he says, “we’ll catch up to you.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Carl stays with Rick, Shane, Morgan, Duane, and Nico to search the dark forest while Daryl keeps the others going in their search up the other side of the creek. After a few more hours of dirt and drudgery, everyone starts to feel overwhelmed and fresh out of hope.

“So,” Carol says petulantly as she flops to sit on the peeling trunk of a fallen tree. “This is it? This is the whole plan?”

Cath sighs and goes to sit next to Carol on the smooth part of the tree where the bark has furled back away from the wood.

Daryl snorts. “I guess the plan is t’ whittle us down into smaller and smaller groups,” he says gruffly.

Lori shrugs her pack off her shoulders and crouches to sit by Carol in spite of the rough bark. “Honey,” she murmurs, “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, and I would do anything to stop it, but you have got to stop blaming Rick. It’s in your face every time you look at him. Rick didn’t hesitate for a second when Sophia ran, did he? I don’t know that any of us would have gone after her the way he did. Or made the hard decisions that he had to make. Or that anybody could have done it any differently.”

“Okay,” Glenn ekes the _y_ sound out awkwardly, “but somebody did. Lucy stayed with Sophia, she didn’t leave her.”

Lori glares at him. “I’ve seen y’all look to Rick and then blame him when he’s not perfect,” she snaps back. “If you think you can do this without him, go right ahead. Nobody is stopping you.”

Daryl loosens his grip on his crossbow and hunches in a futile attempt to uproot the seeds of tension in his shoulders. “Rick’s immune,” he retorts, “he could’ve stayed with Sophia and taken any bites to save her the way Lucy did to save Amy, but he didn’t. Nobody’s perfect, but Lucy did better ’n Rick. Nothing you can say is gonna change that.”

Lori scoffs. “Daryl,” she huffs, “you being in love with Lucy doesn’t make her a more qualified leader of this group than my husband.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and flushes with embarrassment as the heat crawls up the back of his neck. “Nah,” he drawls, “but her bein’ smarter ’n you and your husband and your boyfriend put together does.”

Lori gapes at the bowhunter and gasps indignantly. Daryl sneers back at her, his lips curling to show his teeth.

Cath rolls her eyes at both of them. “Okay,” she cuts in, her voice shrill with annoyance, “that’s enough. Daryl,” she points one accusing finger at the archer, “if you’d known my best friend for longer than six weeks, you’d know she would hate being the leader of this group. Or any group, for that matter. Lucy is outstanding under pressure, but trying to stand with the weight of your lives and your hopes on her shoulders would freaking crush her. Lori,” she flicks her finger to point at the miffed housewife, “we all know Rick is doing the best he can, but yesterday his best wasn’t good enough and Carol gets to feel however she wants to feel about that because her daughter is lost in the woods. Get over yourself and deal—”

Only she never gets a chance to finish that sentence, because the sound of a gunshot resonates from somewhere deep in the dark heart of the woods.

* * *

Lucy wakes up violently at the sound of a gunshot ricocheting through the trees and blinks at the myopic haze of obscurity in front of her. After she puts her glasses back on, she looks up and sees two Asian-American women covered in dirt and dust watching her with selfsame flat looks on their grim faces. One of them has a dark bruise on her left cheek; the other is wearing red cat’s eye glasses with thick plastic frames. One of them looks oddly familiar; the other looks enough like her—same high arch in their dark eyebrows, same upturned nose, same jawline sharp enough to cut glass—that it’s obvious they’re sisters. One of them is holding the tent flap open; the other is holding Lucy at gunpoint.

 _What fresh hell is this?_ she thinks.

“Give us all the supplies you have,” the woman holding the gun says. “Now.”


	5. Far Cry

**People say things like “it wasn’t supposed to go this way” and “this isn’t what I wanted.” They’re just making noise. There’s no such thing as “supposed to,” and what you want doesn’t matter. All that matters is what happened.**

Mira Grant, _Blackout_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 5**  
Far Cry

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Lucy rolls her eyes at the girl in the cat’s eye glasses before she grabs the pistol out of her hand. Jacqui groggily aims the revolver she borrowed from the librarian at them while the sisters gape at her. Lucy yawns loudly but doesn’t bother to muffle the noise in either of her palms because her hands are preoccupied with a firearm. “Safety’s on,” she huffs and shoots the girl in the cat’s eye glasses a bemused look. “I’m guessing you have no idea how to use a gun.”

“I…” the girl in the cat’s eye glasses yawns and makes an indignant noise in the back of her throat, “…I know how to use a gun.”

“We’ve been on the run for days,” her sister adds sharply. “Gert’s just exhausted.”

Gert blushes and glowers at her sister as her cheeks flush a mottled shade of pink. “Shut up, Gilda!” she hisses, mortified.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and cocks her head owlishly as she narrows her eyes at them. “Wait,” she bites down on the consonant incredulously, “you’re Gert and Gilda Rhee?”

Jacqui glances at her with a dubious arch of her eyebrows before she lowers the revolver and slips it back in its holster. “Glenn’s sisters?” she heaves a sigh and shakes her head slowly because that is one hell of a coincidence to stumble on them so early in the morning. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Glenn was born in Detroit to first-generation Korean-Americans: his mother was a child of immigrants, and his father was an immigrant himself. When his parents met in the seventies, his father was looking for a green card and his mother was looking for prospects to get her traditionalist parents off her back. Gert was the happy accident that made them acknowledge the real feelings in their fake marriage. Glenn and Gilda weren’t born until almost a decade later, twins who came into the world seventeen minutes apart. Gilda was named Gilbert until the second grade, after she made it clear that she wasn’t going to grow out of dressing like a girl because she had always been and would always be a girl. Glenn had no desire to move back home after he finished college. Gilda was living in Manhattan and working as a model. Gert had reformed from a hellion with a juvenile record into a history professor at Wayne State University by day and Kwan Jang Nim at a dojang near campus by night. Until the end of the world as they knew it.

“Wait,” Gilda speaks up with a soft voice, hushed and full of hope, “you know Glenn?”

Jacqui nods, a quick bob of her head. “Glenn helped bring our group of survivors together,” she murmurs, “he and T-Dog got me out of Atlanta during the evacuation. Saved my life.”

“Glenn told me that you were coming to visit him for the summer,” Lucy informs them, “but he couldn’t find you before they napalmed Little Five Points. I think he volunteered to run supplies for us because he thought he might be able to find you in the city someday.”

Gert sucks in a sharp breath and swallows hard. Gilda sniffles. Lucy glances at Sophia, who’s faking being asleep. It makes her nauseous, thinking about what other things the little girl might’ve had to pretend to sleep through with a father like Ed leering at her.

“What happened to you?” Jacqui wants to know. “Who were y’all running from?”

“Gilda and I left the night they firebombed the city,” Gert tells her. “We kept moving, scavenging cars for supplies. Glenn may have mentioned that I used to steal cars?”

Lucy ducks her head in a nod. “Glenn also mentioned that he never beat your high score on Ms. Pac-Man,” she deadpans.

Gert snorts. “We ran into a group of men,” she elaborates, “and they claimed us like…like people and objects were interchangeable to them. Or they’re misogynistic assholes who’ve always seen women as objects and the end of the world was just the perfect excuse for them to start treating us like things.”

 _Okay_ , Lucy thinks, _now I know why Glenn said I remind him of his older sister. We’re both angry feminists with blackbelts in Tae Kwon Do._

“We got away before they could hurt us,” Gilda whispers. “We’ve been running ever since.”

Lucy hands the pistol back to Gert before she undoes her braid and snarls her fingers into the soft frizz of her hair to comb it out. “We tried to get back to the highway,” she mumbles, “but a horde of zombies followed us into the woods. We’re going to find somewhere that’s safer than a tent and wait for my friends to find us,” she adds before she starts to braid her hair again, “you’re welcome to come.”

Gert tucks the pistol into the waistband of her skirt and takes a sip from the bottle of water that Jacqui holds out to her before she hands it back to her sister. “Okay,” she says, “do you have any idea where you’re going?”

Lucy shrugs like a bird, with one of her shoulders hunching to meet her earlobe. “Anywhere but here,” she says.

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

It’s Nico’s idea to use Otis’s hunting vest as a stretcher for Carl so Rick doesn’t have to carry him alone. Morgan helps run the boy with the bullet in his chest through fields of dry grass overgrown with threshing weeds. Shane watches them go with a disgruntled look on his face and stays behind to keep an eye on the man who shot the closest thing he has to a son. It’s almost two miles to the farmhouse as the crow flies and Nico doesn’t even get winded. Shane is pleasantly surprised to find himself impressed by her stamina, her ability to run with the wolves. It’s been so long since he was impressed by a woman who wasn’t his best friend’s wife. Years, if he’s being honest with himself.

Nico beats him to the farmhouse because he has to haul Otis’s dead weight for half a mile before they finally arrive. Duane runs to Morgan and wheezes as his father hugs him hard enough to knock the harsh air he was gulping in on the run out of his lungs.

Rick opens the screen door and walks onto the porch wordlessly because the blood on the shirt of his sheriff’s uniform speaks heartbreakingly louder than anything he could possibly say.

“He’s alive…” Otis huffs and puffs. “He’s still…alive?”

Rick doesn’t answer. Shane clenches his jaw and walks up the stairs as his best friend haphazardly tries to wipe off a sheen of sweat and gets blood all over his face instead. “Hey,” he says in what he hopes is a soothing voice. “You’ve got blood, man.”

Nico arches her eyebrows at them as Shane gently wipes the blood away. There’s so much tenderness in his hands, in the vehemence of his whispers. It makes her wonder how much of his feelings for Lori are rooted in his feelings for Rick, platonic or otherwise. “Where is Carl?” she asks softly, “is he okay?”

Rick swallows thickly and walks back inside the farmhouse to nonverbally answer her question. Carl is passed out from blood loss in what looks like a guest bedroom on the ground floor. Nico stays by the door because the room is full of people: an older Southern gentleman in neatly ironed slacks and suspenders with the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up concisely keeping pressure on the wound, a young brunette with no meat on her bones whatsoever in jeans and a salmon pink sleeveless top hanging a fat IV bag from a lamp, a timid blonde teenage girl dressed in shades of pale holding the hand of a coltish boy in a cowboy hat on top of a brown henley and a faded pair of jeans, and a middle-aged woman in a floral print gingham dress with a wing collar standing by with a central line kit.

“You know his blood type?” the Southern gentleman—Hershel Greene, if the Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine on the wall belongs to him—asks.

“A-positive,” Rick stutters, “s-same as mine.”

“Well,” Hershel says, “that’s fortunate. Don’t wander far. I’m going to need you.” Then, he turns to look back over his shoulder at Otis. “What happened?” he wants to know.

“I was…tracking a buck.” Otis points at the window even though he left the carcass of the buck in the woods two miles away. “Bullet went through it…went clean through.”

“Well,” Hershel says, “the deer slowed the bullet down, and that certainly saved his life, but it did not go through clean—it broke up into pieces. I need to see if I can get the bullet fragments out,” he frowns and palpates the flesh around the wound, “and I’m counting six.”

“I never saw him,” Otis whispers as the middle-aged woman—his wife Patricia—pulls him into a hug, “not until he was on the ground.”

Rick turns to look at Shane, horrified and stricken. “Lori doesn’t know,” he says urgently, “she…” he swallows thickly and gulps down a shaky breath, “my wife doesn’t know… _my wife doesn’t know_.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Lori turns back at the resonant sound that blooms in the woods and frowns as the harsh daylight tries to crawl in through the trees. “Okay,” she says, “that was a gunshot.”

Daryl clenches his jaw and makes a frustrated noise low in his throat. “We all heard it,” he mutters.

Lori sighs in a futile attempt to unclench her shoulders. “Why one?” she wonders. “Why just one gunshot?”

Daryl shrugs. “Maybe somebody took out a zombie,” he says.

Lori scoffs. “Please don’t patronize me,” she snaps at him. “Rick wouldn’t risk a gunshot to put down one zombie, or Shane, or Lucy for that matter. You and I both know they would do it quietly.”

“Maybe it wasn’t them,” Cath says, flailing her hands in a frenzy of awkward gesticulations. “Maybe someone else is out here in these woods.”

Carol squirms uncomfortably at the sensation of sweat trickling down her spine to the small of her back. “Shouldn’t the others have caught up with us by now?” she asks forlornly.

“There’s nothin’ we can do ’bout it anyway,” Daryl points out, “we can’t run around these woods chasin’ echoes.”

Lori arches her eyebrows at him skeptically. “Okay,” she huffs, “so what do we do?”

“Same as we’ve been,” Daryl says gruffly, “beat the bush lookin’ for the girls, take our time workin’ our way back t’ the highway.”

Glenn nods. “I’m sure they’ll meet us back at the RV,” he adds.

Lori stomps to get ahead of him, but at least she’s finally moving on. Cath falls into step next to Carol as they step over a tangle of thick, dark roots. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” she whispers.

“Thank you,” Carol whispers back, “the thought of her out here is killing me. I just keep hoping and praying that she doesn’t wind up like Jim.”

“We’re all hoping and praying for you,” Cath tells her softly, “for what it’s worth.”

Daryl snorts and stops in his tracks. “I’ll tell ya’ what it’s worth: not a damn thing,” he snarls, “it’s a waste of time, all this hopin’ and prayin’. We’re gonna locate our girls, and they’re gonna be just fine. Lucy won’t let anythin’ happen t’ Sophia. If ya’ need to have faith in somethin’, have faith in her.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Beth Greene—Hershel’s pale blonde teenage daughter—and Jimmy Fischer—her boyfriend—keep Duane company while Morgan helps Hershel by putting the field medical training he got during his tours of Iraq to good use. Nico steps outside while Rick has a meltdown and blames himself for what happened to Carl because it’s not her job to hold his hand. Shane is still his partner, and he’s got that covered.

When she taps her earpiece, three voices on the other end of the radio answer her in a cacophony of connection. Nico heaves a sigh of pure relief and exhales a quiet gust of laughter that moves through her belly. “Okay,” she says, “me first. Carl got shot.”

Silence.

“What?” Cath squawks.

Nico heaves another sigh. “Yeah,” she says, “you need to tell Lori that her son was shot and that we brought Carl to a doctor on a farm. There are bullet fragments in his chest. Lucy, it’s contingency plan o’clock.”

“I stole a portable ultrasound and a portable X-ray machine from the C. D. C.,” Lucy mumbles, “get someone to bring them to the farm as soon as possible so the doctor can have better visibility. Plastic bags can work as surgical drapes. There should also be two units of my blood in the fridge in my trailer. I’m O-negative, universal donor. Daryl also offered me oxycodone hydrochloride weeks ago, so he’s got a stash of painkillers somewhere.”

“T-Dog needs antibiotics,” Kate murmurs, “he cut himself yesterday and now the wound is infected. Morgan couldn’t do much of a field dressing with the supplies we have.”

Lucy adjusts her grip on the handle of her cane and gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “It’s not my fault that nobody else in our group is smart enough to carry a first-aid kit at all times,” she mutters.

Kate rolls her eyes. “I wasn’t blaming you,” she clarifies, “just stating a fact.”

Lucy bites her lip and flushes with embarrassment. “Okay,” she ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ , “the bad news is that I am still the worst at social cues, but the good news is that I woke up to find somebody holding me at gunpoint this morning.”

“How is that good news?” Cath shrieks.

Lucy smiles, with teeth. “Um,” she hums the _mm_ sound mellifluously, “because Glenn’s sisters are alive and nobody in our neck of the woods got shot.”

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Nico bites out.

Lucy chortles. “I know, right?” she deadpans.

Nico tells Cath to explain the events of that morning to Lori before she bites the bullet and steps back inside. Beth, Jimmy, and Duane are still in the kitchen. Shane and Morgan had to hold Carl down while Rick was giving him a blood transfusion.

“Pressure’s stable,” Hershel tells him solemnly as soon as that bloody work is done.

Rick gulps in air because his chest suddenly feels too tight. “Lori needs to be here,” he says fervently, “she doesn’t even know what’s going on. I’ve gotta go find her, bring her here.”

“You can’t do that.” Hershel shakes his head slowly. “Your son is stable for now, but he’s going to need more blood and that means you can’t go more than fifty feet from this bed.”

Rick turns to look at his best friend with tears in his eyes. “Lori has to be here, Shane…” he says in a sharp, desperate voice. “Lori, she…she has to know.”

“It’s okay,” Nico says. “Lori knows what’s going on. I got through to her on the radio.”

Shane glances at her over his shoulder before he follows Rick out into the other room. Maggie Greene—Hershel’s older daughter, fresh out of college just in time for the end of the world—looks at them expectantly but doesn’t say a word. Shane narrows his eyes at the sight of how stricken Otis is and shifts his focus back to his partner. “Nico and I, we’ve got this,” he says, “but you’ve gotta handle your end.”

“What’s my end?” Rick whispers.

“C’mon, man,” Shane clenches his teeth around a frustrated noise, “your end is being here for your son. There’s no way I’d ever let you walk out that door, man. I’d break your legs if you tried, because if something happened to him and you weren’t here…if Carl slipped away while you were gone, you’d never forgive yourself for that, and neither would Lori, man.”

There’s a part of him that knows he could be the hero, here—but in this moment he doesn’t care about getting the girl because his best friend matters a hell of a lot more. Their partnership is something that he can’t lose. No matter how much he wants to fight for Lori and win his place in the messy pulp of her heart.

Rick slumps into a chair and nods. “You’re right,” he whispers.

Shane forces himself to laugh because he knows Rick needs something light right about now. “When was I ever wrong?” he asks before his tone slips into something dead serious. “When you were in that hospital—the one you were never supposed to leave—you should’ve seen her,” he murmurs. “Lori was like…” he falters, at a loss for words, “…the strength of that woman. You can’t imagine it. See, that’s what you’ve gotta have now. Carl needs that strength from you, so you wire yourself tight, my friend. Y’hear?” he closes his eyes and presses their foreheads together to feel his partner nod. “You’ve got the hard part,” he adds softly as he feels the sliver of Rick’s wedding band against the back of his neck and holds onto him like he can’t imagine he could ever let go. “You just leave the rest to me.”


	6. Take a Friend

**I’m looking out for myself. I know the red dusk,**  
**the teeth and claws of darkness, the folly**  
**of wearing leaves for a blanket. Anywhere I go,**  
**I’ll bring a set jaw and outstretched hands.**

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “The Secret Life of the Forest”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 6**  
Take a Friend

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

When the hellish afternoon slips into the crepuscular hours before nightfall, a clump of shambling zombies sniff out a pack of girls lost in the forest. Jacqui sighs and grabs Sophia by the hand so the little girl can’t obey her fight or flight response and run off into the dark woods. Gert kicks a zombie in the face and it falls in a rotten heap. When it crawls over to Gilda and tries to take a bite out of her ankle, she covers her mouth to muffle a bloodcurdling scream. Lucy drops her cane and stabs the creepy-crawler in the head. Its skull cracks and splits open as she rises to her feet. After that, she hunches to scoop her cane up and shifts her weight as she pivots to jam her arm into the mouth of another zombie that was trying to sneak up behind a horrified Gilda.

Gert turns to look at the librarian with her eyes narrowed into curious slits behind her cat’s eye glasses. “Wait,” she whispers, “did you get bitten on purpose just now?”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “It’s okay,” she wheezes. “I’m immune.”

Gert opens her mouth and shuts it again as a high-pitched noise fizzles out in her throat. “How?” she asks in a voice caught somewhere in the space between a whisper and a shriek. “What?” she flails her hands around her head in a gesture that means her mind is blown. “How?”

Lucy shrugs. “Nico—a friend of mine who’s an engineer and a boss ass bitch—thought my immunity was caused by all of the antibodies I’ve built up over almost ten years of being immunocompromised and fighting off the flu at least once a month,” she explains, “but we met someone else whose natural immunity was caused by almost dying of sepsis from a gunshot wound in his chest with no history of autoimmune disorders that he knows of, so now my hypothesis is that immunity to this virus is a genetic mutation caused by the latent infection trying and failing to alter our immune systems to make us more viable as primary hosts.”

Jacqui sighs. “Honey,” she says, “no one understands you when you start talking fast like that.”

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips. “Sorry,” she mumbles. “What I mean is, viral infections can rewrite your RNA to send messages to your DNA that can alter your biology on a cellular level. It took at least six months for this virus to adapt to learn how to wipe out most of our species,” she pauses to muffle a yawn in the hollow of her palm, “and everyone who survived the global outbreak of the airborne strain of the virus is still infected with the waterborne strain that can alter the way our brains work. It’s still adapting, but so are we. All we need to do is stay alive.”

“Okay,” Gilda ekes the _y_ sound out before she exhales a soft whoosh of air, “you’re the kind of person who knows too much, aren’t you?”

Lucy shrugs again. “Yup,” she grins sheepishly and pops the _p_ sound, “I am what I am.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Rick and Shane extricate themselves from their face-touching embrace in time for Hershel to emerge from the guestroom that has become an emergency operating theater. “Your son is out of danger for the moment,” he informs the stricken former sheriff, “but I need to remove those remaining fragments.”

“Okay,” Nico says, “but how?”

Rick shakes his head so fast he almost discombobulates himself. “You saw how he was with the first one,” he snaps, frustrated that he can’t do anything more for his son than opening a vein.

“I know,” Hershel tells him sharply, “and that was the shallowest one. I need to go deeper to get the others.”

Shane rubs his head and sighs in a futile attempt to shake the tension out of his shoulders. “Oh, man.”

“There’s more,” Hershel says, “his belly’s distended and his pressure’s dropping. Which,” he flicks his gaze to Shane before he explains, “means he’s bleeding internally. I think a fragment must’ve nicked one of his blood vessels. I have to open him up, find the bleeder, and stitch it, and he can’t move while I do that. I mean, at all. If your son reacts the same way as before, I’ll sever an artery and he’ll be dead in minutes. I have to put him under to even try this, but if I do, he won’t be able to breathe on his own.”

“Which,” Maggie cuts in, “would have the same bad results.”

Rick sets his jaw. “What’ll it take?” he wants to know.

“You need a respirator,” Otis tells him, “the endotracheal intubator that goes with it, extra surgical supplies, drapes, sutures.”

Rick nods stiffly and turns back to look at Hershel. “If you had all that,” he rasps, “you could save him?”

“If I had all that,” Hershel says grimly, “I could try.”

“Nearest hospital went up in flames a month ago,” Otis murmurs.

“What about the high school?” Maggie asks.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Hershel tells her with a nod before he turns back to look at Rick. “They set up a F. E. M. A. shelter there. They would have everything we need.”

“Place was overrun the last time I saw it,” Otis says, “you couldn’t get near it.”

Nico folds her arms loosely over her sternum. “Maybe it’s better now,” she postulates.

“I know I said leave the rest to me,” Shane mutters and puts on a smile that gnarls into a grimace, “but is it too late to take that back?”

“I hate you going alone,” Rick tells him. “I’m the one who should—”

Nico frowns and shakes her head slowly to shut him up. These people are doing everything they can to save Carl’s life, but that doesn’t mean he should be spilling his guts about his immunity to strangers.

Shane clears his throat to break the silence that ensues. “Doc,” he says, “why don’t you make me a list, draw me a map.”

Otis squares his shoulders and steps up. “You won’t need a map,” he says. “I’ll take you there.”

Patricia gasps from where she stands in the guestroom doorway. “Otis, no.”

Otis swallows thickly. “Honey,” he says, “we don’t have time for guesswork and I’m responsible. I ain’t gonna sit here while this fella—” he flails one hand at Shane, “—takes this on alone. I’ll be all right. It ain’t but five miles.”

“You sure about this?” Shane asks him.

Otis snorts. “You even know what any of the stuff he’s talking about looks like?” he wants to know.

Shane frowns. “Come to think, no.”

“I’ve been a volunteer E. M. T.,” Otis tells him. “I do. Now, we can talk about this ’til next Sunday, or we could just go do it right quick.”

Shane cracks a real smile at that. “I’ll take right quick,” he quips.

“I’m going with you,” Nico says in a voice that comes out of her mouth flat and sharp like a knife. “I’ll watch your back.”

Shane can’t help smiling wider at the stubborn look in her stunning green eyes. “Okay,” he says.

Rick clenches his jaw and flicks his gaze to the man who shot his son. “I should thank you,” he says gravely.

“Wait ’til that boy of yours is up and around,” Otis murmurs, “then we’ll talk.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Daryl squints at the slant of the light through the trees and exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “We’ll lose the light before too long,” he observes. “I think we should call it.”

Lori sighs and tries to shrug the tension out of her shoulders. Carl was shot, and that’s all she can think about right now; she isn’t much help to Carol or anyone else like this. “Let’s head back,” she whispers.

Carol frowns, the space between her eyebrows crumpling up like her hope has been crushed. “We’ll pick it up again tomorrow?” she asks forlornly.

“Yeah,” Lori tells her in a soft voice that sounds like a half-baked attempt at cold comfort. “We’ll find them tomorrow.”

Cath glances at Daryl. “How much farther do we have to go?” she wants to know.

“Not much,” Daryl says gruffly. “Maybe a hundred yards as the crow flies.”

Cath heaves a sigh and hunches her shoulders like a bird. “It’s too bad we aren’t crows,” she quips.

Glenn has been holding it for over an hour and he stops because he has to take a leak. Of course a zombie stumbles on him with his pants down and he scrambles to zip them up before it sinks his teeth into his flesh. After he trips over a tangle of thorns and sprawls in the dirt, he hears hoofbeats and screams as a skinny girl on a horse brains the zombie with a wooden baseball bat. It’s like her phasers are set to stun, not kill.

Maggie slows her horse as the others come running. “Lori?” she yells over the chaos that ensues as a mortified Glenn buttons up his pants. “Lori Grimes?”

Lori gapes at the farmer’s daughter, wide-eyed. “I’m Lori,” she says.

Maggie nods abruptly before she turns her horse around. “Nico sent me,” she says. “You’ve gotta come now. Rick needs you.”

Lori stops looking so flabbergasted as comprehension dawns. “You’re Maggie,” she says.

“Yes ma’am,” Maggie says and flicks her gaze to Glenn as Lori hands over her pack and gets on the back of the horse, “that’s me. Rick said y’all had others on the highway, that big traffic snarl?”

“Uh,” Glenn says. “Yeah.”

Maggie nods again. “Backtrack to Chestlehurst Road,” she says, “two miles down is our farm. You’ll see the mailbox. Name’s Greene.”

Cath shrugs the extra backpack onto her shoulder as Glenn watches the farmer’s daughter ride off into the forest with a dumbfounded look on his face.

Daryl growls low in his throat and shoots the stunned zombie in the head, splitting its skull with an arrow. “Shut up,” he snarls.

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

Andrea, Amy, and Dale spend most of the afternoon looking for antibiotics to help T-Dog, but they only find a guitar for Glenn and a few bottles of pink vitamin water instead. It was a lazy, hazy day with the pile of smoldering bodies they burned on the side of the road—just another day in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

When the others finally return to the highway, they all look worse for wear. It doesn’t take very long for Dale to notice that even more of their people are missing. “What happened?” he wants to know. “Where are the others?”

“Carl got shot,” Glenn says without any further explanation.

Dale frowns so expressively that his eyes go wide and his jaw shuts like a beartrap. “Wait,” he says, “shot? What do you mean, shot?”

“I don’t know, Dale.” Glenn wheezes at how heavy his legs are in the aftermath of walking ten miles through the wilderness. “I wasn’t there. All I know is, this chick rode up out of nowhere like Zorro on a horse and took Lori.”

Dale adjusts his grip on the rifle he was using to keep watch and frowns at the hunter. “You let her?” he yawps.

“Climb down outta my asshole, old man,” Daryl growls. “Nico called ahead to tell us she was comin’.”

Dale sighs in a futile attempt to unclench. “I heard screams,” he says to Glenn, “was that you?”

“I almost got attacked by a zombie,” Glenn mumbles, “it was a close call.”

Andrea folds her arms tight across her chest and turns to look at Kate. “Why didn’t anybody call us and tell us what the hell was going on?” she wants to know.

“Nico called,” Kate retorts, “but T-Dog passed out while I was talking to her over the radio and I didn’t want anything to distract us from helping him. There wasn’t anything we could do for Carl until they got back anyway.”

Andrea makes an indignant noise even though she knows the herbalist isn’t wrong. Amy doesn’t have the experience to perform the operation herself and they don’t have any of the necessary supplies for a surgical procedure. It just sucks, being the last to know.

“What happens now?” Cath wonders. “Should we all go to the farm and regroup?”

Carol shakes her head with slow vehemence. “I won’t do it,” she snaps. “We can’t just leave.”

Dale sighs and leans against the front of the RV. “Carol,” he says, “the group is split. We’re scattered and weak.”

Carol glares at him with a ferocity that she could get used to, a flare and spark that won’t burn out. “What if they come back and we’re not here?” she retorts.

“If the girls found their way back and we were gone, that would be awful,” Amy murmurs.

“Okay,” Daryl says brusquely. “We gotta plan for this. I say tomorrow morning is soon enough to pull up stakes, give us a chance to rig a big sign and leave out some supplies. I’ll hole up here tonight, stay with the RV.”

Dale nods, a quick bob of his head. “If the RV is staying,” he says, “I am too.”

Carol smiles at them with tears stinging the corners of her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispers. “Thank you both.”

Andrea sighs and shrugs the weight of this hellish day off her shoulders. “I’m in,” she says.

Amy grins at her sister and it shines through the dirt and dust all over her face. “I guess that means I’m staying too,” she adds.

“Well,” Glenn mumbles, “if you’re all staying, then I’m—”

Dale holds up one hand to shut him up and shakes his head abruptly. “Not you, Glenn,” he says firmly, “you’re going to the farm. Take the church van.”

Glenn huffs indignantly. “Why me?” he asks. “Why is it always me?”

Dale gives him a stern look. “Glenn, you have to find this farm, reconnect with our people, and see what’s going on,” he says, “but most important, you have to get T-Dog there. Amy did everything she could do without Lucy’s first-aid kit, but that cut has gone from bad to worse and he has a very serious blood infection.”

Glenn swallows hard at the sight of T-Dog huddled under a blanket even though it’s hot as hell out here. Kate gives him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and goes to move the bulk of their supplies out of the van and into the unoccupied trailer. Romy whines at her as she rises to her feet and loops the leash around her wrist.

Dale holds his hands out to make his point. “Glenn, you need to get him to that farm and see if they have any antibiotics,” he adds, “because if not, T-Dog will die, no joke.”

Daryl goes to get something out of his bag and hurls an oilcloth the old man left on the seat of Merle’s bike at him. “Keep your oily rags off my brother’s motorcycle,” he mutters in warning before he sets a plastic bag full of drugs on the hood of the Peletier’s old jeep. “Why’d you wait ’til now t’ say anything?” he asks. “I got my brother’s stash. Crystal, X, don’t need that…” he throws a bottle of pills to Glenn, “…got some kickass painkillers. Doxycycline,” he gives another bottle to Dale, “not the generic stuff neither. It’s first class. Merle got the clap on occasion.”

Dale grins and goes to give T-Dog the antibiotics.

Cath walks Harley over to where the hunter is crouched down by his brother’s motorcycle. “Crystal meth?” she says and side-eyes the blue stuff in the stash he left out in the open.

Daryl squints at her before he rises to his feet. “I don’t get fried no more,” he tells her sharply. “I quit that shit, cold turkey.”

Cath looks at him with her eyebrows furrowed and her big brown eyes narrowed from cartoonish to curious. “Wait,” she says, “so you’ve been going through withdrawal this whole time?”

Daryl nods. “Yeah,” he says gruffly. “I quit ’bout a week after I met Lucy…” he swallows hard and heat crawls up the back of his neck again because he knows he should be saying this to her instead of her best friend, “…’cause just bein’ with her feels much better ’n gettin’ high ever did. I was never addicted, y’know? I just did it ’cause it was somethin’ t’ do.”

Cath shrugs halfheartedly because she’s never done any drugs and she doesn’t know whether he’s telling the truth about being addicted or not, but she does know that he’s trying and that’s good enough for now. _Well_ , she thinks, _at least that explains why he’s been such an asshole_. “Lucy’s been my best friend for eleven years,” she tells him in a quiet but scary tone of voice, “and she’s the closest thing I have to a sister. If you hurt her, I’ll beat you to death with a shovel.”

Daryl snorts. “I ain’t gonna hurt her,” he says. “I think Lori was right. I think…” _I think I’m in love with her._

Cath smiles at him, with teeth. “I know,” she says, “now all you need to do is tell her.”

Famous last words.


	7. Circumstances

**Symptoms of love:**  
**Firstly, the catastrophic inability to distinguish**  
**between love and lust,**  
**between observation and omen,**  
**between necessity and contingency.**  
**Later, the sense that it is provocative**  
**for the beloved to walk down the street,**  
**in the aura of his beauty;**  
**anything could happen in this dangerous situation.**

Hannah Black, “Etiology”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 7**  
Circumstances

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Daryl lies awake in the RV listening to Carol trying to cry herself to sleep and grits his teeth around a frustrated noise at the mournful sounds. It sucks that he can’t do anything for her, for any of them.

Merle used to say he was like a stray dog: dumb as shit, and loyal to anyone who fed him. Daryl isn’t dumb, but he had been starving—starving for affection, starving for somewhere to belong. Until he met Lucy. When she wormed her way into his heart, he opened himself up enough to let all these people in, and now he gives a shit about them. Doesn’t matter that a lot of them still look at him like he’s nothing but redneck trash.

Daryl clenches his jaw and goes to grab his pistol from where he left it, on the tiny table in the middle of the RV.

Andrea—who’s sleeping in the seat on the side of the table to his left underneath the kitschy sign that says _How About a Nice Cup of Shut the Hell Up?_ —blinks at him before she flicks the dregs of sleep out of her eyes and watches him sling his crossbow over his shoulder. “Where are you going?” she asks blearily.

Daryl checks his clip out of habit and tucks his pistol into the waistband of his pants. “I’m gonna walk the road,” he murmurs, “look for the girls.”

Andrea nods and rises to her feet. “I’m coming too,” she tells him with a muffled yawn.

Daryl grunts and steps out of the RV. Andrea isn’t the first person that he’d want to have watching his back in a dangerous situation, but if she wants to walk off worrying about Jacqui he’s not going to stop her. Besides, even though he’s been clean for a month he’s still having mild cravings; and if someone is with him then he won’t be thinking as much about swallowing meth to take the edge off.

Cath is sitting on the front step of the RV because she can’t sleep either, not with her best friend lost in the forest. Lucy may be immune to the zombie virus, but she’s not able-bodied enough to outrun the shambling hordes of the undead forever and she’s not immune to being eaten alive.

Daryl clears his throat and Dale peers down at him from where he was keeping watch on top of the RV. “We’re going for a walk,” he says gruffly as Cath rises to her feet and lets him pass. “Shine a light in the forest. If they’re out there, it’ll give ’em something t’ look at. Wanna come along?”

Cath tilts her head and nods, succinctly. Harley perks up and wags his tail as she loops his leash around her wrist. “I’ll try to get through to Lucy on the radio,” she huffs as Harley jumps over the guardrail before the mutt tries to drag her down the hill and into the woods.

Daryl squints at her in the dark and stops at the bottom of the hill to wait for Andrea. “Lemme talk t’ her,” he says.

Cath shrugs and hands over her earpiece. “Sure.”

Daryl puts the radio in his ear and taps it like he’s seen the girls do. When he hears a voice— _her_ voice—on the other end of the frequency, he sucks in a sharp breath and exhales with a shudder that moves through his whole body.

“Hello?” Lucy says. It’s one word, but that’s all he needs to feel a flourish of hope bloom deep in his chest.

Daryl swallows hard. “Hey,” he murmurs. “You okay?”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “we kept walking until we found a farmhouse. There’s even running water, from a well outside. Gert kicked the bucket that was hanging on the pump.”

Daryl snorts. Lucy is one of the luckiest people he’s ever met. According to her, that’s just the universe’s way of trying to balance out the bad shit that’s happened to her in the past. Daryl scoffed the first time she told him that because the universe hadn’t tried to balance out all the shit he’s been through with anything good, but he was wrong. Lucy is the good thing he’s got coming to him, he just knows it. All he has to do is find her. “What about food?” he asks.

“There’s a peach tree,” Lucy answers. “I know because I stepped on a peach…” she laughs at that and it makes him smile in the dark before that bright sound fizzles out and she adds, “…I can’t walk anymore. I’m in a lot of pain.”

Daryl sets his jaw and exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “I’m gonna find ya’,” he tells her softly.

“I know,” Lucy says. “I believe in you.”

Famous last words.

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Nico and Shane return to the farm on Fairburn Road without Otis, but with the supplies Hershel needs to operate without killing his patient. Rick, Lori, Kate, Glenn, Morgan, T-Dog, Maggie, and Hershel crowd through the front door onto the wraparound porch and down the steps to meet them.

“Carl?” Shane asks in a harsh rasp as Nico hands a bagful of medical supplies to Hershel and gives Kate a hug.

Rick exhales a breath that he didn’t realize he was holding and nods sharply. “There’s still a chance,” he says.

“Otis?” Hershel asks solemnly even though he already knows the answer to his question.

Nico shakes her head. “No,” she tells him softly.

Hershel swallows thickly. Maggie just stares at Otis’s truck with her mouth slightly open and tears stinging the corners of her pale green eyes. Hershel squares his shoulders and tries to stand tall. “We say nothing to Patricia,” he murmurs. “Not ’til after. I need her.”

Shane adjusts his grip on the duffle with the respirator inside and stares at his best friend with a stricken look on his face. Rick exhales a shuddering breath and puts one hand on the back of his neck to pull him into a warm embrace. Shane clenches his jaw and wraps an arm around Rick before he glances at Lori over her husband’s shoulder.

“What happened?” Maggie wants to know.

Shane extricates himself from the feeling of safety that he doesn’t think he deserves. “They kept blocking us at every turn,” he whispers, “we had nothing left—we were down to ten rounds—and he said he’d cover us and that we should keep going, so that’s what I did. I just kept going, but I…” he chokes on the bile in his mouth and inhales sharply through his nose, “…I looked back and he…”

Nico steps up and puts a hand on his shoulder to steady him. No pressure, just a gentle squeeze before she lets go. “Otis wanted to make it right,” she murmurs, “and he did. That’s what happened.”

Shane flicks his gaze to her as she puts her hand in the pocket of her jeans. Nico has seen him at his worst tonight, but even so she’s still watching his back and covering his sorry ass. It makes him want to hold her hand and never let go. “Yeah,” he whispers. “That’s what happened.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Fischer Farm._

* * *

Gert tests the purity of the water from the well outside with one of the kits she and her sister had stolen from an abandoned hardware store in Sharpsburg before the Claimers found them. Lucy stays up with the lantern from the campsite where they slept to watch her because she likes to know how things work.

“Who were you talking to over the radio?” Gert asks. “Your boyfriend?”

Lucy blushes in the eerie low light and shakes her head slowly. “Daryl’s a friend,” she mumbles, “he’s fourteen years older than I am and he’s an asshole to people who aren’t me sometimes and he’s kind of racist with an animosity towards Asian people in particular so I don’t know how to tell him that my biological mother was half-Japanese and it’s blatantly obvious that he’s never thought critically about any of his internalized prejudices in his life, but…” she gnaws on the inside of her cheek, “…but he’s also strong and loyal and kind and witty and snarky and so _good_ if you give him a chance and I love him in spite of everything telling me that I shouldn’t. I’ve been in love before. I know how it feels. I know that love isn’t logical. I also know that it hasn’t ended well for me, historically. I’ve been raped. I’ve been emotionally abused. I’ve been heartbroken. I pick the wrong guy every time and I’m terrified of making that mistake again. Which is why I haven’t been in a relationship since I was a teenager.”

Gert pours some of the water out of the bucket she kicked into a glass that she found in the kitchen and takes a sip. _It feels like a sleepover at the end of the world,_ she thinks, _with a girl I met twelve hours ago spilling all her secrets_. “Who cares?” she asks. “I get why you’re terrified, but you need to stop thinking like a traumatized and insecure teenage girl and start thinking like the badass who saved my sister from turning into a zombie today. It’s the end of the world. If you love him, woman up and tell him that. Seize the moment,” she quips, “because tomorrow you might be dead.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

“So,” Andrea says and ekes the _oh_ sound out with forced nonchalance, “you really think we’re going to find them?”

Daryl shines the flashlight on her to look at the flat expression on her face and makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he asks. “We just started lookin’.”

Andrea hunches her shoulders awkwardly. “Well, do you?” she wants to know.

Daryl snorts. “It ain’t the mountains of Tibet,” he mutters. “It’s Georgia. They’re holed up in a farmhouse that can’t be more ’n a few miles from where we’re at with a peach tree and runnin’ water. They’re gonna be fine. People get lost and they survive. It happens all the time. Hell,” he adjusts his grip on his crossbow and swings the flashlight around to check on Cath and her mutt, “I was younger ’n Sophia and I got lost. Nine days in the woods eatin’ berries, wipin’ my ass with poison oak.”

“Nobody went looking for you,” Cath deduces as Harley snuffles around in the dark.

Daryl shakes his head. “Nah,” he says gruffly, “my old man was off on a bender with some waitress. Merle was doin’ another stint in juvie. They didn’t even know I was gone. I made my way back, though. Went straight into the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. No worse for wear,” he clenches his jaw and tries to shake the memory of how alone he felt the moment he realized that no one cared enough to notice he was gone off before he adds, “’cept my ass itched something awful.”

Andrea snickers and keeps her mouth shut to muffle the sound. “I’m sorry,” she wheezes once he turns to look at her. “I’m sorry, that is a terrible story.”

Daryl snorts again, with laughter the second time around. “Only difference is,” he says, “our girls’ve got people out lookin’ for ’em. Call that an advantage.”

“Lucy would’ve gone looking for you,” Cath tells him quietly. “If she had known you then, she would’ve gone looking for you.”

Daryl swallows hard. _Yeah_ , he thinks. _Lucy’s my kind of girl, the kind that runs after little girls so they won’t be lost in the woods by themselves—that’s why I love her_. “Yeah,” he murmurs, “I know she would’ve.”

After they’ve walked further into the dark forest, Andrea gasps at something that rustles softly through the foliage and breaks the comfortable silence. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and slips his finger onto the trigger of his drawn crossbow while he squints at the shadows. Cath takes one of her knitting needles out of the holster on her thigh and keeps a tight grip on the leash as Harley barks at the zombie hanging from a tree. When he moves, he rustles the leaves on the branches above him.

Daryl shines his flashlight into the tent pitched nearby to check for supplies before he sees the note on a piece of paper nailed to the trunk of the tree. “‘Got bit. Fever hit. World gone to shit. Might as well quit,’” he reads as the zombie gnashes its teeth. “Dumbass didn’t know enough to shoot himself in the head. Turned himself into a big swingin’ piece of bait,” he narrows his eyes at the corpse and shakes his head, “and a mess.”

“Ugh…” Andrea gags and hunches with her hands on her knees as her stomach heaves.

Daryl glances at her over his shoulder. “Ya’ alright?” he asks.

“Trying not to puke,” Andrea tells him through clenched teeth.

Daryl nods and tries not to start thinking about Lucy, whose stomach is weak as hell in spite of how strong the rest of her is. If she were here with him, she’d probably be doing the same thing. “Go ahead if you gotta,” he says.

“No,” Andrea huffs, “I’m fine. Let’s just talk about something else for a minute.”

Cath hushes the mutt until he’s growling instead of barking. “How’d you learn to shoot?” she asks.

Daryl shrugs. “Gotta eat,” he mutters, “that’s one thing the zombies and us have in common. I’d guess it’s the closest he’s been to food since he turned. Look at him, hangin’ up there like a big piñata…” he points at the mess of rotten meat below the zombie’s knees, “…the other undead fuckers came and ate all of the flesh off his legs.”

Cath grimaces as Harley claws at the tree trunk. It feels like an omen, the _pittura infamante_ that symbolizes a crossroads. Only she doesn’t know who among them is standing at a road diverged. Maybe all of them.

“I thought we were changing the subject,” Andrea groans as she pukes up everything in her stomach.

Daryl smiles crookedly where she can’t see before he turns to look at her. “Call that payback for laughin’ about my itchy ass,” he says before he goes to gather the supplies from the tent. “Let’s head back.”

“Wait.” Andrea frowns and flails one hand at the hanged man. “Aren’t you gonna…?”

Daryl squints at her. “No,” he says gruffly. “He ain’t hurtin’ nobody. Ain’t gonna waste an arrow, neither. He made his choice. Opted out. Let him hang.”

* * *

_Friday, 20 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 68._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

After he shaves his head to hide the wound on his scalp from a screaming Otis struggling and tearing his hair out, Shane hears a knock on the bathroom door and opens it even though he’s naked from the waist up. Nico is standing in the hallway with her arms folded and a smile on her face, still bold as brass.

Shane glances down and notices that something is different about her. There’s no engagement ring on her finger, no chain around her neck keeping a promise she made to a dead man thousands of miles away. “You took it off,” he murmurs.

Nico shrugs and snarls the fingers of her left hand into the bend of her elbow. “Kyle only proposed because I gave him an ultimatum,” she tells him stoutly. “I’m done wanting things I can’t have. If you start feeling the same way,” she arches her eyebrows at him suggestively and smiles wider, “let me know.”

Shane watches her walk away with a smile lurking in one corner of his mouth that becomes a sneer once he looks at himself in the mirror. There’s no coming back from what he did tonight for them, for Carl, for Lori, for Rick, for love.

Trouble is, sometimes love is not enough.


	8. Witch Hunt

**_What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?_ **  
**That’s what I’d like to know.**  
**What are we all doing in a place like this?**

Joy Harjo, “Deer Dancing”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 8**  
Witch Hunt

* * *

_Saturday, 21 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 69._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

When the morning comes, the ones who stayed on the highway overnight regroup at the farm on Fairburn Road in time to attend the funeral of a man they never had a chance to meet. Patricia begs Shane to give the eulogy, and he reluctantly does in spite of how out of place he feels in Otis’s clothes. It’s so uncomfortable for him to speak of the man he killed that his tongue feels too heavy in his mouth and his tone sounds more stilted than sorrowful as the words fall out. There’s nothing he can say or do to make her feel better about losing the man she loved and having no body to bury under the pile of rough stones they gathered before dawn to mark his grave.

After the sunrise fades into daylight and a palpable mugginess chokes the cool factor out of the humid air outside the farmhouse, Carl wakes up with a dry throat and squirms under the sheet that stuck to the sweat that had dried on his skin during the night. “Sophia?” he asks in a gulping rasp of a whisper.

Rick smiles at his son and feels overwhelming grateful to Lucy in that moment because if the librarian hadn’t run after Sophia into the forest, he would’ve had to lie to Carl about her being safe and sound. “Sophia’s just fine,” he says, keeping quiet so the bite of worry doesn’t creep into the cadence of his voice as Carl smiles back and shuts his eyes. “Lucy’s with her.”

After the funeral, Lori stays in the house with their son while Rick calls the others to crowd around the rusted buttercream yellow hood of the Peletier’s jeep. Shane is limping and wincing every time he puts weight on the ankle he twisted the night before. Morgan is wearing a floppy hat to keep the sun out of his eyes and a clean t-shirt with no button-down over it because it’s ninety-seven degrees out. Duane is still wearing a long-sleeved henley to hide the bite on his forearm, even though it’s healed to the point that it’s not bleeding anymore. Morgan gives him a pointed look until he takes the hint and goes to sit on the roof of the RV with a huff of disgruntlement. Amy watches him go and shuts her mouth to muffle a snort of laughter that bubbles up and fizzes in the back of her throat. Andrea exhales a quiet gust of laughter and leans next to Shane with her elbows on the hood of the jeep.

T-Dog is still recovering from the infection that got into his blood through the gash on his forearm, and he won’t be going out to search for another day at least. Glenn pitches the tent he shares with his friend and wonders idly where his sisters are going to sleep, if they brought any camping gear with them. Cath, Kate, and Nico set up their own tents around the trailer to protect the supplies Lucy was hoarding before she ran off into the woods. Daryl pitches his tent right next to the door of her trailer, lowkey staking his claim on its missing occupant without saying a word before he comes over to where the jeep is parked and stands next to Cath and Harley on his leash with his arms folded tight across his chest.

“How long have your girls been lost?” Hershel asks as his oldest daughter brings over a roll of paper.

“This’ll be day three,” Rick tells him with an edge of frustration in his voice at having lost anyone to begin with.

Maggie stops in front of the jeep and unrolls the paper onto the hood. “County survey map,” she explains. “Shows terrain and elevations. I marked grids for about ten square miles each way, since Nico has been able to contact her friend over a radio that has a ten-mile range from here. There are half a dozen farmhouses in the area. It shouldn’t be too hard to find out where they ended up.”

“This is perfect,” Rick murmurs. “We can finally get this thing organized, start by searching in teams.”

“Not you,” Hershel tells him sternly. “Not today. You gave three units of blood,” he elaborates. “You wouldn’t be hiking five minutes in this heat before passing out.” At that he turns to Shane. “Not to mention your ankle. Push it now, and you’ll be laid up for a month. No good to anybody.”

Daryl squints at the map and memorizes it while he comes up with a plan to track down the girls. “I’m gonna head back to the creek,” he mutters, “work my way from there.”

“Kate and I can start with the farthest part of the grid and work our way in,” Cath adds before she goes to gear up for a day of hiking in the humid bowels of hell masquerading as many acres of forest and farmland in rural Georgia.

“I can still be useful,” Shane interjects. “I’ll drive up to the interstate, see if they wandered back. I’ll take Carol with me.”

“I’ll go, too,” Nico chimes in with a grin. “I need to scavenge more car batteries.”

Daryl growls low in his throat and narrows his eyes at her as his nostrils flare in a way that seems vaguely threatening.

“Oh,” Nico huffs and rolls her eyes at him, “don’t give me that surly look, Katniss. Us learning how to make bullets was Lucy’s idea. It’s what she’d want me to do. Besides,” she arches her eyebrows at him as her grin comes back with a vengeance, “we both know she wants _you_ to find her.”

Daryl adjusts his grip on his crossbow and looks away as heat crawls up the back of his neck and sweat trickles down to pool at the base of his spine. Nico is right. Sophia is safe enough with Lucy that every able-bodied person in the group doesn’t need to beat the bush looking for them all day. There are half a dozen farmhouses within a ten-mile radius of where they are. It’s only a matter of time before he finds the right one, and less people out looking means he has a better shot at finding the girls than anybody else. Which is what he wants: to find Lucy and show her that he’s good for something, because he feels like he isn’t good enough for her.

“All right, then.” Rick clears his throat awkwardly. “Let’s start doing this right.”

“That means we can’t have our people out there with just knives and knitting needles,” Shane points out with forced lightness. “I know the girls can shoot, but the others need the gun training we’ve been promising them.”

“I’d prefer you not carrying guns on my property,” Hershel says, “we’ve managed so far without turning this farm into an armed camp.”

“All due respect,” Shane retorts in a sharp tone of voice that doesn’t sound the slightest bit respectful, “you get a crowd of those things wandering in here…” At that, he trails off. It’s not a threat, but Shane can see that Hershel isn’t comprehending the horror of a massive horde like the one they encountered on the highway and that gives him a bad feeling deep in his gut—like something is wrong here.

“Look,” Rick grits his teeth around the word and narrows his eyes at his best friend in warning before he turns back to Hershel, “we’re guests here. This is your property and we will respect that. So,” he says and puts his Colt on top of the survey map to show everyone that he’s serious about this, “first things first. Set up camp, find the girls.”

“I’ll gather and secure the weapons,” Shane grumbles as he puts his sidearm on the hood of the jeep, clenching his jaw and trying to play nice, “make sure no one’s carrying ’til we’re at a practice range offsite. I do request one rifleman on lookout. Morgan’s got experience,” he glances up at the roof of the RV since that would be the most obvious place to put someone on lookout with a gun without invading Hershel’s space, “he and Dale can take shifts.”

Rick glances down at the pistol on the map and turns back to Hershel again. “Our people would feel safer,” he adds, “less inclined to carry a gun.”

Hershel nods stiffly. Cath glances at Kate and both girls side-eye him in a nonverbal agreement that he totally has something to hide.

Rick squares his shoulders in a futile attempt to unclench. “Thank you,” he murmurs as some of the tension bleeds out of the humid air.

“That stuff you brought,” Maggie cuts in, “got more antibiotics, bandages, anything like that?”

“No.” Amy shakes her head and lies her ass off because she doesn’t want to let anything slip about immunity or the possibility of a cure to a family of perfect strangers, even if they did save Carl’s life. “Just the stuff you’ve seen.”

“We’re running short already.” Maggie turns to look at her father with a crinkle in between her eyebrows that can only be described as adorable. “I should make a run into town.”

Rick frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing. “Not the place that Shane went?” he asks her with an edge of worry in his voice.

“No,” Maggie tells him. “There’s a pharmacy just a mile down the road. I’ve done it before.”

Rick flicks his gaze to the campsite that’s coming together under the shade of a grove of trees. “See that man in the baseball cap?” he asks Hershel rather than Maggie herself. “That’s Glenn, our go-to-town expert. I’d ask him along just to be cautious.”

Hershel gives his oldest daughter a long, stern look before he nods. Maggie tries not to get miffed that her father seems to think she needs his permission for every little thing she does and goes to talk to Glenn.

Nico stops her with a hand on her shoulder. “Would you mind seeing if the pharmacy has paroxetine?” she asks.

“What’s that?” Maggie wants to know.

“Lucy’s antidepressants,” Cath informs her as she walks back to her tent.

“Sure.” Maggie nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “I can do that. Hey,” she glances at her father to make sure that he’s out of earshot before she asks, “does Glenn have anything going on with any of the girls in your group?”

“I’m married,” Cath and Kate answer matter-of-factly before Kate grins over her shoulder at the shorter girl and shouts “Jinx!” and Cath rolls her cartoonishly huge brown eyes at her.

“I’m gay,” Amy deadpans.

“I’m straight,” Nico explains with a sprinkle of snark in her cheerful tone, “but Glenn’s not my type. Andrea says he’s like a kid brother to her since he’s the same age as Amy. Carol’s husband died last week—good riddance—and Lori’s married to Rick.”

“What about the girls who went missing?” Maggie wants to know.

“Lucy has a thing for Daryl,” Nico tells her, “Sophia’s twelve, and Jacqui had something going on with a guy named Jim, who died less than a week ago. Glenn is all yours if you want him.”

“Good to know,” Maggie says and smiles at them before she goes to get her man. It’s slim pickings in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and now she knows she won’t be stepping on anyone’s toes if she uses him to blow off a little steam. Trouble is, Glenn isn’t the kind of guy you use—he’s the kind you keep.

Amy shuts her mouth to muffle a giggle and smiles as she and shakes her head. “Maggie seems nice,” she says.

“Girl’s got balls,” Andrea quips, “she’s gonna blow his mind.”

Nico frowns as she notices Shane talking to Lori. It’s not that she’s jealous, or anything. Nico thinks Shane is sexy—he’s tall, dark, and dangerous and he has abs for days—but she’s not going to waste her time on someone who can’t get over his weird obsession with his best friend’s wife. It’s that whatever is going on between Rick and Shane and Lori is going to pressurize until something—or someone—explodes. _Not good_ , she thinks succinctly before she goes to find Carol and tell her what’s going on.

“I hear you’re fast on your feet and know how to get in and out,” Maggie says and she has to stifle a grin at the nervous way Glenn furrows his eyebrows at her. It’s obvious that he noticed the innuendo, but he’s not sure if she’s flirting with him or what. Which is a hell of a lot cuter than it should be. “Got a pharmacy run,” she clarifies with a concise sort of patience, “you in?”

“Uh…” Glenn can’t stop himself from gaping at her, flummoxed and at a loss for words.

“Miss,” Dale says and breaks the beginnings of the awkward silence brewing in the hot air between them to ask, “what’s the water situation here?”

“Got five wells on our land,” Maggie answers him tersely, “the house draws directly from Number One. Number Two well is right over there,” she turns and points to a well in a patch of dirt and sunlight, “we use it for the cattle, but it’s just as pure. Take what you need. There’s a cart and containers in the generator shed behind the house.” At that, she turns back to Glenn and holds his gaze for a second just to watch his mouth pop open at the sight of her again. “I’ll go saddle your horse, then.”

“Wait,” Glenn frowns and snaps out of his stupor as she walks away, “did she say horse?”

* * *

Rick takes off his sheriff’s hat and sits on the steps in front of the farmhouse until the hunter walks by with his crossbow slung over his shoulder and a .38 special revolver at the small of his back under his shirt. “Daryl,” he says and rises to his feet. “You okay on your own?”

Daryl scoffs. “I’m better on my own,” he mutters and keeps walking until he turns his back on him again, “don’t worry. I’ll be back before dark.”

Rick frowns. “Hey,” he says and tries not to look startled at the look of rage Daryl shoots at him once he turns back around. “We got a base. We can get this search properly organized now.”

Daryl gnashes his teeth because he’s burning daylight and he doesn’t want to make a habit of wasting time. “You got a point,” he snaps, “or are we just chattin’?”

Rick sighs and cuts straight to the heart of the matter. “You don’t owe us anything,” he murmurs.

Daryl squints at him, scrutinizing. “You’re damn right I don’t,” he says gruffly. “I don’t owe you shit. Lucy’s the first good thing t’ happen t’ me in a long time. I don’t wanna lose that. I ain’t gonna stop lookin’ ’til she’s back where she belongs, so don’t think for one second that I’m doin’ this outta some misplaced sense of obligation to the man who cuffed my brother to a roof and left him for dead. I’m doin’ this for her,” he clenches his jaw and makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, “got it?”

Rick swallows thickly and nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I got it.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Good,” he bites out before he stomps off into the woods.

* * *

After that, Andrea goes off with Amy to search their grid while Cath and Kate do the same. There’s a debacle at the well because a bloated zombie somehow fell down into the water and no one noticed until then. Glenn reluctantly agrees to let them lower him down to wrangle the zombie with a thick rope and they all drag it out of the water. T-Dog pulls it apart because it gets stuck on the edge of the well and it tries to take a bite out of him with its intestines hanging out, but it doesn’t stop moving until he bashes its head in. Maggie rides off to the pharmacy with Glenn shaken and scared, but she’s too stubborn to show it.

Daryl searches five square miles of the grid by himself and he finds an empty farmhouse with a Cherokee rose blooming among the overgrown weeds outside that he picks and gives to Carol, but he doesn’t find the girls.

Nico spends the night with Shane and tent walls are thin enough that everyone knows what the thing that goes bump in the night is. Cath still can’t sleep, and she’s out walking in the fields with Kate when she finds Lori sobbing and shines her flashlight on the piece of plastic clutched in her shaking hands. There’s no mistaking that unholy pink plus sign, even in the dark.

“Oh God,” Cath whispers like it’s the end of the world all over again. “You’re pregnant.”


	9. Test for Echo

**His hand is clenched. Door with a bad hinge, it wouldn’t open. _Do not let go of the arrow, let it slip through your fingers as you relax your grip_. This is good advice. He couldn’t do it. There is no way to get to the future from here.**

**The key to archery is sustained attention. An arrow is a stick with feathers, an extension of the mind. Men and their thoughts, their quivers and their arrows: it helps to see how these things move, and where they land.**

Richard Siken, “The Stag and the Quiver”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 9**  
Test for Echo

* * *

_Sunday, 22 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 70._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Daryl groans long and loud as the rooster in the coop behind the farmhouse crows and squawks at the asscrack of dawn. _Shut the fuck up_ , he thinks with a snarl and squints at the beams of sunlight creeping in from outside his tent.

It’s been four days and three nights since Lucy first went missing, and Daryl hasn’t slept a wink since then. Of course the insomnia could also be a side effect from detoxing, but he’s been clean for almost six weeks and he should be out of the woods by now even though she isn’t. If he’s losing sleep over anything, then he’s losing sleep over _her_.

After he lies on his cot for a while, Daryl overhears the others wake up and walk around the campsite. It’s laundry day, so Carol goes to fill a tub with buckets of water from one of the wells that hasn’t been contaminated by the blood and guts of a grotesquely bloated zombie. If they’d bothered to wait until he got back, he could’ve shot the damn thing in the head with an arrow before Glenn went down to wrangle it out of the water. It would’ve been a hell of a lot safer, not to mention less of a mess.

 _I bet they’ve got a washer and dryer in that big ol’ house of theirs_ , he thinks with a sneer, _but they ain’t gonna let Carol use it ’cause they don’t want us here and I can’t even blame ’em for that, since trouble seems to follow Rick wherever he goes_.

Truth is, Daryl isn’t exactly thrilled with the idea of staying at the farm. Seeing how good these people have it even in the aftermath of the damn apocalypse sets his teeth on edge and makes him feel like more of a freak than he did before, like he doesn’t belong here.

Daryl exhales a disgruntled noise through his nose before he finally gets his ass out of bed, changes out of the clothes he slept in because he wants to look halfway decent when he finds the farmhouse where Lucy’s holed up, and zips up the flap of his tent before he steps out into the sunlight. Cath, Kate, Nico, Amy, Andrea, and T-Dog are clumped around the yellow jeep parked in the shade of the trees. Lori and Carol are hanging clean laundry out to dry on a clothesline strung in between a pair of sugar maple trees and chatting about dinner plans, almost like Sophia didn’t get lost in the woods and Carl didn’t get shot two days ago. It’s obvious they’re using household chores like cooking and doing the laundry as a way to keep their shit together the best way that housewives know how, but they can’t play house forever—they’re going to have to adapt or they’re not going to survive.

Rick and Shane went out to the sign they left on the highway and found the smorgasbord of supplies untouched. Which put both men in a bad mood, if the scowl lurking under the brim of Shane’s cap and the tension in Rick’s shoulders is any indication. “Morning, guys,” Rick mutters on his way over to the jeep. “Let’s get started. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

Cath leans with her elbows on the hood of the jeep above one of the headlights. “I tried to get through to Lucy on the radio last night,” she informs the group, “but her battery must’ve finally died.”

Rick hunches over the unfurled map on the hood of the jeep and impatiently taps his fingertips over a bend in the creek. “We have no way of knowing where the girls are,” he adds. “Which is why everyone’s getting new search grids today.”

Jimmy slouches out from behind one of the sugar maple trees with his hands in his pockets, slumping his shoulders like he’s nervous about something. “I’d like to help,” he says. “I know the area pretty well and stuff.”

Rick narrows his eyes at him suspiciously. “Hershel’s okay with this?” he wants to know.

Jimmy falters at the question and clears his throat awkwardly before he ducks his head in a quick nod. “Yeah,” he says, “he said I should ask you.”

“All right then,” Rick says, taking him at his word.

Daryl shrugs on a brown plaid shirt of his that was drying on the clothesline before he snagged it and does up the buttons. “I’m gonna borrow a horse,” he says brusquely, “head up t’ this ridge—” he points at a spot on the map and taps it with one fingertip, “—right here, take a bird’s eye view of the whole grid. If they’re out there, I’ll spot ’em.”

“Good idea.” T-Dog smirks at him. “Maybe you’ll see your chupacabra up there, too.”

Rick turns to look at Daryl and cocks his head curiously. “Chupacabra?”

“Oh,” Dale says, “you’ve never heard this. Our first night in camp, Daryl told us that the whole thing reminds him of a time when he went squirrel hunting and he saw a chupacabra.”

Rick takes the rifle Dale hands over to him with a bemused look on his face. Jimmy laughs outright.

Daryl narrows his eyes at him and his glare is harsh enough to take the heat out of the air for a fraction of a second. “What’re you brayin’ at, jackass?” he snarls.

Jimmy swallows hard as his laughter withers and dies in his throat. “You believe in a bloodsucking dog?”

Daryl swipes at the fluid that has accumulated in the corners of his eyes since he spent the last three nights without sleep with his thumb. “You believe in dead people walkin’ around?” he retorts.

Rick frowns and grabs the rifle before Jimmy can get his hands on its stock. “Hey,” he says, “ever fire one before?”

Jimmy shakes his head. “Well,” he says, “if I’m going out, I want one.”

Daryl snorts and slings his crossbow back over his shoulder. “Yeah,” he mutters before he goes to borrow a horse without asking, “and people in hell want Slurpees.”

* * *

_Sunday, 22 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 70._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Daryl only makes it halfway to the ridge before he stops to shoot a squirrel trying to scuttle up the trunk of a tree and catches sight of the doll Eliza gave to Sophia in the creek bed. After he rides off with the doll, the horse spooks because a copperhead hisses and slithers through the dead leaves on the ground and throws him so hard he falls down the hillside into a ravine and gets impaled by one of his arrows.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Daryl huffs and winces at the sharp pain in his side.

When he crawls out of the water on his hands and knees, Daryl feels the ache of every scrape and prelude to a bruise on his body. After he cuts the sleeves of his shirt off with his knife and knots the fabric to make a tourniquet, he forces himself to stand up even though everything hurts and hunts down his crossbow only to see that all but one of his arrows was lost on impact with the water at the bottom of the steep fluvial slope. When he tries to climb up the precipitous hillside, he makes it about halfway before he falls back down into the dank mulch of dead leaves and dirt at the bottom of the ravine. Daryl blinks as light floods his senses and sees Merle crouched in front of him once he opens his eyes.

“Why don’t ya’ pull that arrow out, dummy?” his brother says brusquely. “Ya’ could bind your wound better.”

Daryl lets his eyes flutter shut and grins in spite of the dirt and blood in his mouth. There’s no way in hell his brother could actually be out here in the middle of nowhere, but he doesn’t give a shit—he still misses his brother and sometimes he wishes he was here. “Merle,” he rasps.

Merle sniggers and gives him an unctuous smile. “What’s goin’ on here?” he wants to know. “Ya’ takin’ a siesta or somethin’?”

Daryl shakes his head and winces as another throb of pain slices through him like a serrated knife. “Shitty day, bro…” he murmurs.

Merle snorts. “Would ya’ like me t’ get ya’ a pillow?” he says. “Maybe rub your feet?”

Daryl clenches his jaw and tries to open his eyes again. “Screw you,” he retorts.

“You’re the one who’s screwed from the looks of it,” Merle says. “All them years I spent tryin’ t’ make a man of ya’, and this is what I get? Look at ya’. Lyin’ in the dirt like a used rubber. You’re gonna die out here, little brother…” he shakes his head slowly, “…and for what?”

Daryl swallows thickly. “Ugh…” he groans, “…a girl. We lost a little girl.”

“So you got a thing for little girls now?” Merle scoffs. “Nah. I see right through you, little brother. I bet you’re out here ’cause you’ve been cravin’ a slice of Miss Lucy’s sweet cherry pie. Ain’t that right?”

Daryl growls low in his throat at the sound of her name coming out of his brother’s mouth. “Shut up,” he snarls, “don’t you talk about her.”

Merle sneers down at him. “I noticed you ain’t out lookin’ for ol’ Merle no more,” he says with a harsh edge in his voice.

Daryl squeezes his eyes shut because his brother isn’t wrong. “Tried like hell to find you, bro…” he whispers.

“Uh huh,” Merle says in a voice that oozes sarcasm like slick oil. “like hell ya’ did. Ya’ split, man. Ya’ lit out the first chance ya’ got.”

“You lit out,” Daryl mutters, “all you had t’ do was wait. We went back for you. Rick and Lucy and I…” he grits his teeth and winces again at yet another stab of pain. “We did right by you.”

“This the same Rick that cuffed me t’ the rooftop in the first place and forced me t’ cut off my own hand?” Merle asks him with an acerbic glint in his voice that feels like a dull sawblade. “This him we’re talkin’ ’bout here? You his bitch now?”

Daryl squints at the right hand clenched into a fist—the hand his brother sawed off that day on the roof of the Healy building. _I must’ve hit my head a hell of a lot harder than I thought_ , he thinks as his eyes flutter shut again. “I ain’t nobody’s bitch,” he retorts.

“You’re a joke is what ya’ are,” Merle says. “You’re nothin’ but a freak t’ them. Redneck trash, that’s all ya’ are. Yeah, they’re laughin’ at ya’ behind your back. Ya’ know that, don’t ya’? I got a little news for ya’, son…” he cocks his head slantwise and smirks as Daryl struggles to open his eyes, “…one of these days, they’re gonna scrape ya’ off their heels like ya’ was dog shit.”

 _I don’t think you’re trash_ , Lucy had said. Lucy, who never says anything she doesn’t mean; Lucy, who took one look at him and told him that he shouldn’t be alone; Lucy, who said that just being with him makes her feel better.

“Hey,” Merle smacks at his chest with the right hand he shouldn’t have and Daryl flinches as his stomach churns at the lurch of sense memory, “they ain’t your kin, your blood. Hell, if ya’ had any damn nuts in that sack of yours, you’d go back there and shoot your pal Rick in the face for me. Now ya’ listen t’ me. Ain’t nobody every gonna care about you except me, little brother…” Merle puts that hand on his face and pats his cheek hard enough to make him grit his teeth in pain, “…nobody ever will.”

 _I like you_ , Lucy had said. Lucy, who makes him want to believe in shit like miracles and fairytales and true love.

“C’mon,” Merle stands up and looms over him like their father used to, “get on your feet before I have t’ kick your teeth in. Let’s go.”


	10. Hope

**I am melting**  
**my heart into gold,**  
**so that it will be worth something**  
**when I give it to her. I pick out every**  
**flinch and fear that kept me**  
**from doing this sooner.**  
**I am ready for her.**  
**I am ready.**

Ashe Vernon, “Two Months”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. III**  
_What Lies Ahead_  
**Chapter 10**  
Hope

* * *

_Sunday, 22 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 70._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Fischer Farm._

* * *

Lucy spends the better part of two days in bed with her ankle elevated, trying not to cry because the pain was so overwhelming and failing miserably. There are four bedrooms in the farmhouse where she holed up with the other lost girls, two on each floor. Jacqui, Gert, and Gilda stayed in the rooms upstairs while Lucy slept in the bedroom on the ground floor—the one she assumed was a guestroom because the closet and dresser were empty and every surface was devoid of clutter. Sophia was supposed to sleep in the other bedroom on the ground floor, but she was afraid to sleep by herself. After she snuck into Lucy’s room two nights in a row, the librarian gave up and let her stay in the same room with her because she didn’t have the spoons to say no. Lucy had no idea how to talk to other kids back when she was young enough that she had to interact with other kids every day, and she has no idea how to talk to them now that she’s an adult.

Sophia is twelve years old, but having a father who treated her like a porcelain doll he wanted to break and a mother who sheltered her to protect her from the violence he was capable of stunted her emotional growth and that makes her seem younger. Fragile, like she’s made of glass instead of flesh and bones. Sophia getting attached to her actually kind of freaks her out, but she can’t kick the poor kid out of bed. After they regroup, Sophia will go back to clinging to Carol. It’s only a matter of time.

 _All human wisdom is contained in these words_ , Lucy thinks, _wait and hope_.

It’s afternoon on the fourth day by the time Sophia abruptly wakes her up with an urgent shake of her shoulder. Lucy makes a garbled noise in the back of her throat and puts her glasses on before she turns and sees two women standing in the doorway: a thin brunette with green eyes and a pale blonde with the kind of eyes that look either blue or gray depending on a multitude of external factors, both dressed in flowy blouses over frayed jeans and boots.

There are five people on the farm where Carl was taken to recover from a ribcage full of buckshot. These can only be Maggie and Beth, the daughters of the man who cracked his chest. Their clothes are clean and they’re unarmed; the fabric of the blouses they’re wearing is too flimsy to hide any kind of weapon, and they aren’t dressed to conceal a knife or a gun anywhere else. Nico had told her over the radio that Hershel didn’t want anyone to carry on his property, and that makes Lucy think he has something to hide.

“Lucy, right?” Maggie asks in a Southern drawl that makes her sound like a woman born and bred in Georgia. “Your friends’ve been looking all over for you.”

It’s petty, but Lucy has an instinctual distrust of skinny girls—years of bullying at a formative age will do that to you. Unfortunately, relying on the kindness of strangers has become an inevitable part of living thousands of miles away from home in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. “Glenn was attacked by a zombie,” she murmurs. “What did you hit it with?”

“Baseball bat,” Maggie tells her tersely as Beth flinches ever so slightly at the word _it_ being applied to a zombie, the dehumanizing lack of a pronoun.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and starts listing the suspicious things about the Greenes in her head. One, they use blunt weapons that aren’t likely to deal a killing blow against the walking dead. Two, the patriarch of the family doesn’t want people carrying guns on his property even though they’re living in the aftermath of the zombie apocalypse. Three, they don’t think of zombies as inhuman. _I have a bad feeling about this_ , Lucy thinks as she moves to sit on the edge of the mattress.

“I can’t believe you’ve been at Jimmy’s house this whole time,” Beth says as the librarian pulls her skirt back up over her leggings, turns her socks inside-out and puts her shoes back on before she refastens her belt around her waist. “Jimmy’s my boyfriend,” she explains at the confused look Sophia gives her, “this is his parents’ house.”

Lucy checks the chamber of her revolver out of habit even though she knows she hasn’t fired any bullets and puts it back in one of the holsters on her belt. “Where are they?” she asks. “Your boyfriend’s parents.”

“We came here to pick some peaches,” Maggie cuts in before her sister has a chance to answer the question. “We’d’ve found you sooner if anyone had bothered to tell us you were in a house near an orchard.”

Lucy winces and grits her teeth in pain as she tries to put weight on her ankle. “How exactly did you get here from your house?” she wants to know.

Maggie watches her knuckles clench white on the handle of her cane and narrows her eyes at the gauze wrapped around her forearm. “We came on horseback,” she tells her. “Why?”

* * *

_Sunday, 22 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 70._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

Daryl lets his eyes flutter shut for half a second and snaps out of his daze because something yanks on his foot. When he opens his eyes again, Merle isn’t standing over him anymore. There’s just a zombie gnawing on his boot and yowling while it gnashes its teeth. Daryl flinches at the horrible sound coming out of its rotting mouth and kicks the zombie in the face, wincing and whining like a wounded animal as the sharp pain stabs through him again. When he scrambles to grab his crossbow, he becomes more and more aware of the invasive pang of being skewered by one of his own damn arrows.

It’s not a hallucination, that’s for sure. Daryl can smell the stink of decay and hear the slice of putrid flesh tearing once he stabs the zombie in the arm with his hunting knife, the skin tight and dry enough to shred like paper. It tries to grab him by the hair in spite of the rigor mortis that must’ve set in weeks ago. Daryl growls and bashes its face in with a stick hard enough to unhinge its jaw from its skull and splatter blackened, congealed blood in the dirt. There’s another zombie shambling towards him through the shallows—its brown skin has almost faded to a dark shade of gray while its eyes are a grotesque, jaundiced yellow. Daryl clenches his jaw around a jagged scream and pulls the arrow out before he draws back his bowstring, nocks the bolt covered in his own blood and guts, and shoots the approaching undead fucker in the head.

After that, he tears up his button-down shirt to make a pressure bandage and binds his wound before he guts and eats the squirrel he killed and starts to climb back up out of the abyss. It’s a hell of a lot easier now that he’s high on adrenaline that ferments and fizzes in his veins—the primal, unmitigated thrill of fighting to survive and _winning_.

Merle creeps back in once he’s halfway to the top. “What’s the matter, Darylina?” he asks with a snigger and a sneer, “that all ya’ got in ya’? Throw away that purse and climb.”

“I liked it better when you was missin’,” Daryl snarls because even though he knows he’s talking to himself, being pissed off at the memory of his brother is still helping him get out of this alive.

“C’mon,” Merle drawls mockingly, “don’t be like that. I’m on your side.”

“Yeah?” Daryl scoffs and mutters, “since when?”

“Hell,” Merle says, “since the day you were born, little brother. Somebody had t’ look after your worthless ass.”

“I ain’t worthless,” Daryl growls, “and you _never_ took care’a me…” he grunts and grabs a tangle of hanging vines to haul himself up, “…you talk a big game, but you was never there. Hell, y’ain’t here now. Guess some things never change.”

“Well,” Merle says, “I’ll tell ya’ what. I’m as real as your chupacabra.”

“I know what I saw,” Daryl retorts and grits his teeth as the vines bite into his palms.

“Yeah,” Merle snorts, “and I’m sure them shrooms ya’ ate had nothin’ t’ do with it, right?”

“You best shut the hell up!” Daryl shouts even though he knows his brother can’t hear anything he says.

“Or what?” Merle says and shakes his _what_ out into a flatulent mess of syllables. “Ya’ gonna come up here and shut my mouth for me? C’mon and do it then, if ya’ think you’re man enough. Hey,” he jeers, “kick off them high heels and climb, son.”

Daryl clenches his teeth so hard it hurts at the harsh echoes of phantom laughter. Shit, he’s so close now he can almost taste it under the blood and bile in his mouth.

“Ya’ know what?” Merle asks, “if I were ya’, I’d take a pause for the cause, little brother, ’cause I just don’t think you’re gonna make it t’ the top.”

 _I believe in you_ , Lucy had said. Lucy, who can’t tell a lie to save her life. Lucy, who’s out here somewhere waiting for him to find her and take her back where she belongs. Lucy, who belongs with him whether she knows it yet or not.

“C’mon,” Merle says. “C’mon, little brother. Grab your friend Rick’s hand.”

Daryl chokes back another scream and grabs a handful of twigs and dead leaves in the herculean effort he’s making to prove more to himself than anybody else in the world that he can do this, that he isn’t the worthless asshole people have always thought he was. When he rises to his feet and looks dead ahead at the cluster of spindly trees with their rustling leaves, Merle is gone.

“Yeah,” Daryl shouts to fill the illusory void his brother left behind, “you better run!”

* * *

_Sunday, 22 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 70._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

It’s a golden afternoon by the time Maggie and Beth return to the farm on horseback with two wooden buckets full of peaches. Beth finds Lori and Carol in the kitchen with Patricia and goes to help them make dinner while Hershel tries to get Maggie to stay away from Glenn, who is still out in the forest with T-Dog searching their grid and wishing he could talk to his sisters about her. Glenn had a girlfriend in high school and a boyfriend in college, but casual was more his speed pre-apocalypse. What’s happening with Maggie is confusing because it doesn’t feel casual at all—even though all they’ve done is have sex with no strings attached.

Andrea, meanwhile, catches sight of Daryl shambling out of the woods and shouts to alert the others that a zombie is slouching towards camp. Rick squints at him as the daylight burns overhead. “Shane,” he yells as his best friend makes his way out into the overgrown field of wild grass with a pickaxe in his hand, “hold up. Hershel wants to deal with them himself.”

Shane frowns at him. “What for, man?” he yells back. “We got it covered.”

Rick swears under his breath and goes to grab his Colt Python from the armory stashed in the Winnebago before he runs after his best friend. When he stops to gape in horror at the familiar crossbow dragging on the ground, he hears the almighty sound of hoofbeats galumphing their way.

Daryl glares at the former sheriff as he aims the Colt between his eyes and clicks the safety off. “This is the third time you’ve pointed that thing at my head,” he snarls. “You gonna pull the trigger or what?”

Andrea is about to shoot him in the head, but in the end she doesn’t get to take her shot because Lucy rides into the line of fire on a white Tennessee Walker and gallops in circles around them before her noble steed calms down enough to stand perfectly still. Nobody moves for a few seconds and silence flourishes in the humid air before Lucy breaks it.

“ _Fuck_ ,” the librarian says with slow vehemence as she tries not to squirm in the saddle and fails miserably, “I haven’t ridden a horse in years. I—”

Only she can’t get another word in, because Daryl roughly drags her off the horse and fists one hand in the soft frizz of her hair to hold her where he wants her while he wraps his other arm ever-fixed around her waist and stops her mouth with his.

When he kisses her, Lucy tastes like peaches and salt, like a damn fairytale. It’s obvious that she hasn’t been kissed in years from the startled noise she makes in the back of her throat, from the way her whole body trembles before she kisses him back. Daryl groans and skims his tongue over the seam of her soft, pretty lips. Lucy gasps as she opens her mouth for him and moans softly at the slow flick of his tongue stroking hers, the rasp of his stubble rubbing against her upper lip and her chin, the wild thump of her heart beating a resonant pulse deep in her chest.

It doesn’t matter that he’s caked in dirt and dried mud, or that he tastes like raw meat and blood from the squirrel he ate, or that he’s wearing zombie ears strung on a shoelace around his neck. All that matters is his ravenous kisses, the heat of his lips on hers so overwhelming that her knees go weak as she gently sucks on his tongue and lets him slip deeper into her mouth.

Daryl tugs her bottom lip between his teeth to break the kiss and ducks his head to nuzzle the crook of her neck. It occurs to him before he passes out from blood loss that most fairytales end with the first kiss. This isn’t the end for him and Lucy, though.

It’s the beginning.


	11. Peaceable Kingdom

**There in that embrace, she feels something**  
**shuffling around, moving warily**  
**fumbling through the dusty rooms of her heart,**  
**and, one by one, turning on the lights.**

Toby Barlow, _Sharp Teeth_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 11**  
Peaceable Kingdom

* * *

_Sunday, 22 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 70._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Lucy blushes so hot that she feels like she might spontaneously combust in the aftermath of the kiss Daryl gave her before he passed out, the kiss that made her skin tingle all over and made her toes curl into the orthopedic insoles of her boots. _I haven’t been kissed since the night Adam broke up with me_ , she thinks, _and that was almost nine freaking years ago. I forgot how good a kiss can be. It feels like I’m on fire_.

Daryl slumps with his head heavy on her shoulder, his sinewy arms unraveling from around her waist as she drops to her knees in a daze among the wild grass and weeds. Lucy is uncomfortably aware of the cold blood and sweat on his face—dried bloodstains around his mouth from the squirrel he ate raw and his own blood from a deep cut on his forehead that mirrors the gash on her temple—and warm blood from where his arrow skewered him after the fall seeping out through his shirt. Rick is wearing a shirt that he soaked through with sweat and Shane didn’t even bother to button up his shirt because of the sweltering heat, but neither of the men who ran out into the field are bloodied and bruised like Daryl is.

Lucy glares at Rick and he recoils at the rage in her pale gray eyes. “What the hell happened to him?” she wants to know. “Cath told me that everyone was searching in pairs. Why wasn’t anyone with Daryl?”

“Daryl said he was better on his own,” Rick tells her with a hint of guilt in his voice.

Lucy grits her teeth around a frustrated noise. “Of course he did!” she retorts with a sharp edge in her voice that feels like a slap in the face to him, “because Daryl is too stubborn ask for help no matter how badly he needs it. If you’re our leader…” she glances at Shane and she doesn’t miss the glimmer of jealousy in the look he gives Rick, “…then you have to learn how to understand the people who follow you before someone else gets hurt.”

Rick swallows hard and nods. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress. “I’m not the one you owe an apology to,” she says, “now are you going to help me with him or what? I’m too crippled to carry him myself.”

Shane grunts to hide a snort of laughter that fizzes up like bitter condensation in the back of his throat. “You alright?” he asks her after he hauls the inert hunter up and scoops one sinewy arm over his shoulder.

Lucy shrugs with one shoulder before she finagles herself back up onto her feet and puts her right foot in one of the stirrups to get back on the horse. _I need a change of clothes, something to eat that isn’t peaches or sunflower seeds, and a nap_ , she thinks, _in that order_. “I will survive,” she informs him from her seat in the saddle. “I always do.”

Rick frowns as she uses her legs to steer the horse instead of the reins. “Sophia?” he asks.

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder. “Sophia is fine,” she informs him. “Gert hotwired the car she found in the garage at the farmhouse where we were staying and Maggie gave her directions to the Greene place so she could drive there.”

“Why’d you take the horse, then?” Shane asks.

Lucy shrugs again. Truth be told, the Fischers had a vintage 1953 Buick Roadmaster Skylark in their garage and it would’ve been awkward to squish five people and their baggage into a two-door convertible. “I wanted to take the scenic route,” she deadpans.

Shane narrows his eyes at the inaudible lumps of flesh hanging from a shoelace that Daryl tied around his neck. “Rick,” he mutters, “he’s wearing ears.”

Rick snatches at the necklace hard enough to break the shoelace and stows it away in the pocket of his shirt. “Let’s keep that to ourselves,” he hisses under his breath.

* * *

Gert, Gilda, Jacqui, and Sophia arrive at the Greene house just in time to derail the dinner preparations with a slew of hugs and tearful reunions. After she grits her teeth and endures being embraced by half a dozen people one by one by one by one, Lucy ducks into her trailer to take a quick shower and change into clothes she hasn’t been wearing for days. When she emerges in clean lingerie and leggings, she finds Cath, Kate, and Nico waiting for her amidst the clutter that has taken over the interior of her solar-powered teardrop.

Lucy flops onto her bed and wraps her ankle in a brace to keep it from aching too much before she pulls a black camisole over her head. It’s too hot to dress any warmer. Hell, she just got out of the shower and sweat is already dripping like a string of pearls down her spine to pool at the small of her back. “What’d I miss?” she wants to know.

“All of the things,” Kate deadpans. “ _All of them_.”

“Glenn has a thing for Maggie and they did it yesterday when they went to loot a pharmacy,” Nico tells her, “he came back with eleven condoms and I stole two of them to use with Shane.”

“There was a zombie in one of the wells and it fell apart when we tried to pull it out.” Kate grimaces at the memory of its intestines slithering on the ground like visceral snakes. “Blood and guts everywhere. So gross.”

Cath frowns, the space between her eyebrows crumpling up like a piece of used tinfoil. “Lori’s pregnant,” she mumbles.

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek as she does the math in her head. Rick was shot during the first week of the global outbreak, before the broadcasts about the virus from ground zero in Los Angeles went national. If he’d knocked her up pre-apocalypse, Lori would be showing by now. Rick woke up from his coma ten days ago. If he’d knocked her up the night he came back from the dead, she wouldn’t’ve had time to notice that her period was late. There’s no way that her baby is biologically his.

There’s also no way Shane is going to get over his infatuation with his best friend’s wife. If this secret gets out, all hell is going to break loose.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips as her anxiety churns in her stomach like spaghetti around the tines of a fork and turns to look at Nico. “You okay?” she asks.

Nico shrugs. “I had no idea Lori was pregnant when I slept with Shane,” she clarifies with a sigh, “and I never would’ve slept with him if I’d known about it because the last thing we need is more post-apocalyptic drama.”

Lucy snorts at that. _Famous last words_ , she thinks. “Too late,” she murmurs. “Daryl kissed me. How’s that for dramatic?”

* * *

When she tells her friends about the kiss, it goes better than she thought it would. Daryl somehow got them to change their minds about him at some point during the past four days. Apparently he didn’t eat or sleep the whole time because he was busy worrying about her, too.

 _No wonder he passed out_ , Lucy thinks as she hobbles down the hall to the guestroom where Hershel is stitching up the stubborn asshole who kissed her with blood in his mouth, _gnawing hunger and lack of sleep on top of blood loss would be enough to make anyone short circuit like an overheated node_.

Daryl is awake by the time she opens the door and seeing him shirtless on a bed makes her blush all over again even though his skin is bruised and streaked with blood and dirt. Worse, she can’t look him in the eyes because her heart is thumping so hard she feels like everyone in the room can hear the almighty sound.

 _Okay_ , Lucy thinks, _calm your tits. It was just a kiss. What matters isn’t how tongue-tied and twitterpated I feel. Nothing else matters as long as Daryl is alright_.

Hershel is suturing the wound on his back while Amy scans his abdomen for internal hemorrhaging with the portable ultrasound machine. Rick and Shane both glance at Lucy as she shuffles into the room, her cane making a quiet hollow noise against the floorboards. Rick gives her a nod of acknowledgment. Shane flicks his gaze to her face and smirks at how red her cheeks are. Daryl turns to look at her and the sight of her standing in the doorway makes the tension that had taken root in his shoulders slowly seep out of him, like a light chasing shadows away.

“Hey,” says Amy with a smile, “good timing. I was supposed to remove your sutures three days ago.”

Lucy touches the gash on her temple reflexively. It only needed a few stitches, but leaving them in too long causes scars that are eerily reminiscent of the monster from Mary Shelley’s _Frankenstein_. There’s a long, thin scar from her arthrodesis surgery that runs down the back of her right hand to her forearm with echoes of the sutures permanently etched into her skin. It’s the reason that she always wears a brace on her wrist, to hide those cicatrices.

“How’s he looking?” Rick asks.

Hershel frowns. “I had no idea we’d be going through the antibiotics so quickly,” he mutters.

“Well,” says Amy with a hint of irritation in her voice, “you wouldn’t have antibiotics at all if Daryl hadn’t given them to you, so…”

Hershel cuts the last stitch and puts the surgical instruments he used on the bedside table. “Any idea what happened to my horse?” he wants to know.

“Yeah,” Daryl grunts, “the one who almost killed me? If it’s smart, it left the country.”

Hershel stops washing his hands in a bowl of water to heave a sigh. “We call that one Nelly,” he explains, “as in Nervous Nelly. I could’ve told you she’d throw you if you’d bothered to ask,” he towels his hands dry as he walks over to Rick before he adds, “it’s a wonder you people have survived this long.”

Lucy glares at the insinuation as Daryl flops back against the pillows and slants that intense gaze of his to her. “Not everyone has acres of farmland to hide in,” she cuts in sharply, “your privilege doesn’t mean you’re more capable of survival than anyone else. It just makes you lucky.”

Hershel rolls his sleeves back down over his forearms. “I take it you’re Lucy,” he says.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound.

Hershel eyes the revolvers holstered to her belt. “I told Rick that I don’t want you people carrying guns on my property,” he tells her with a mild warning in his cordial tone.

“Why?” Lucy wants to know.

Hershel looks at her askance with a modicum of something mournful in the corners of his mouth. “I don’t need to explain myself to you,” he says.

“Okay,” Lucy says and smiles at him so viciously that he feels a shiver of fear trickle down his spine, “then I don’t have to give a shit about what you want.”

Hershel shoots the former sheriff a stern look before he leaves the room. Shane follows him into the hallway where Lori is waiting. Rick heaves a sigh and turns to look at Lucy. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “You’re not acting like yourself.”

 _You don’t know me well enough to say that_ , Lucy thinks. “I’m sorry,” she says out loud. “I’m having a bad ankle day, and I’m a bitch when I’m in pain. I took my meds, but they won’t kick in for half an hour. I’m not going to apologize for asking that question, though. It’s a question that you—as our leader—should’ve asked as soon as your son was out of the woods.”

Rick heaves another sigh because she isn’t wrong and that means he can’t be mad at her for proceeding with caution, in her own abrasive sort of way. “Lucy, this place…” he glances out the window at the pastoral fields, “…it could be a home for me and my family. We could settle here. I’m not going to let anyone or anything stand in the way of that.”

Daryl growls at the implicit threat and winces at the effort it takes to sit up. There’s ultrasound gel on his stomach and back, viscous and congealed on top of where his muscles flex under his skin. Now he knows how Lucy feels when everything hurts so badly that she can’t get out of bed. “Lucy’s right,” he bites out. “We ain’t even been here a week. We don’t know these people. We ain’t got no idea if this place is safe or not, so don’t ya’ dare threaten her for wantin’ t’ know the answer t’ a question everyone in the group’s been askin’ since ya’ told us t’ give up our damn guns just ’cause Farmer John said so.”

Rick huffs and walks over to the doorway, cracked open so a sliver of Lori telling Shane off shines through. “I’ll talk to Hershel about this later,” he mutters before he leaves the room.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips and snatches up a clean white towel from a pile on top of the dresser. Daryl watches her soak the towel in water and wring it out with a scrutiny that makes her feel heated and shivery all at once as she shuffles to his bedside and props her cane against the wall. “I need you to stand up,” she tells him softly, “can you do that for me?”

“Sure.” Daryl grunts and rises to his feet to stand in front of her in nothing but a bandage and a faded pair of jeans that have seen better days. “Why?”

Lucy blushes so hard her ears flush red as she puts one hand on his bare shoulder for balance and wipes a streak of dried mud off his chest with the other. There are fresh cuts overlapping the old slubs of scar tissue, but none of them are deep enough to need stitches. “Um,” she mumbles and gulps around the anxious lump in her throat, “because your wounds could get infected if you don’t get cleaned up.”

Truth be told, he doesn’t need to stand up for this. Lucy is just too nervous to sit in bed with him while she gives him a bath. It’s a borderline pornographic situation, even though she knows he can’t do anything to her because of his injuries. Daryl has a gorgeous chest and seeing him shirtless makes her want to nibble on his collarbone and bury her nose the sparse hair below his clavicle. It’s like being kissed by him for the first time has awakened something primal in her, like every urge she’s been trying to ignore since puberty hit is coming back at her with a carnal vengeance.

“Ain’t gonna apologize, neither,” Daryl says gruffly.

Lucy blinks and blushes harder as she gets her mind out of the gutter. “What?” she asks.

Daryl sets his jaw and tries not to scream internally at the sensation of her skimming the damp towel over the scars on his back. Lucy is special to him, so damn special that he doesn’t want to hide anything from her. Not even the ugliest parts of himself. “I ain’t sorry I kissed ya’,” he says. “I’ve been wantin’ t’ do that for a while.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek and forces herself to look him in the eyes. “Why?” she wants to know.

“Why d’you think?” Daryl squints at her as a frustrated noise snarls low in his throat. “I kissed you ’cause I like you and I wanna be with you. Ain’t never wanted anythin’ so much.”

Lucy snorts. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it, asshole,” she retorts. “You didn’t eat or sleep for three days. You stole a horse that got spooked and threw you down a ravine. You were impaled by one of your own freaking arrows! You have no idea how lucky you were today. You could’ve damaged your colon, or shredded your small intestine, or fractured your ilium. You could’ve died before I had a chance to tell you that I want to be with you, too.”

Daryl narrows his eyes at her and his heart constricts deep in his chest at the fear in the whites of her eyes, the nervous flare of her nostrils, the huff and puff of her anxiety like a wolf at the door. Lucy bites her bottom lip because he’s staring at her with such an intense look in his blue eyes that she can’t shy away. Daryl puts one hand on the back of her neck and tilts her chin up with the other. Lucy gulps and lets her bottom lip slip out from between her teeth. Daryl tangles his fingers in her hair and holds her gaze for a few seconds before he kisses her again.

It’s gentle at first, until she moves closer to him so her chest rubs against his and the soft texture of her silk and lace bra whispering through her camisole is enough to elicit another frustrated noise that snarls low in his throat. Daryl groans as his dick twitches in his jeans and thrusts his tongue into her mouth to kiss her hard and rough and deep. Lucy clings to his shoulders so her hands are no longer an afterthought and kisses him back with such intoxicating sweetness that he gets overwhelmed by how much he wants more of her, how fast his heart is beating. It makes him wish he could just crack open his chest and give the damn thing to her. Maybe that would be easier than feeling this way, his skin barely keeping him inside.

Daryl breaks the kiss to suck on her bottom lip before he nips at her chin and moves his mouth to her neck. Lucy seems to like it rougher than he thought she would, if the way she moans and squirms in his arms at the sensation of his teeth nibbling on the tender flesh of her throat is any indication. Daryl growls and bites down on the sensitive juncture of her neck and shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that won’t fade overnight, staking his claim on her with his teeth and soothing the sting of his possessiveness with the flat of his tongue.

Lucy bites her lip and whimpers because his stubble and beard are as rough as his lips and tongue are soft against her skin. “Daryl,” she gasps. “Daryl, stop.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and makes a herculean effort to stop his mouth before he moves back to look at her face. “Sorry,” he mutters even as his chest swells with pride because Lucy is breathless and blushing so hard her glasses are fogged up around the edges, “did I do somethin’ wrong?”

Lucy smiles at him shyly and shakes her head. “No,” she tells him softly, “you were doing everything right. I just don’t want to start anything that you won’t be able to finish without reopening your wound.”

Daryl smirks at her because he can feel the hard little nubs of her nipples sticking out through her shirt and her bra. After two months of thinking she was as immune to him as she is to the zombie virus, it’s nice to know he isn’t the only one feeling all hot and bothered here. “What’d ya’ have in mind?” he wants to know.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and clears her throat awkwardly instead of answering that loaded question. “I should go,” she mumbles, “you need sleep.”

Daryl swallows hard and untangles the hand in her hair to tilt her chin up so he can look her in the eyes. “I’d sleep much better if ya’ stayed with me,” he murmurs.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and smiles at him again. “Okay,” she ekes the _y_ sound out into a yawn, “you’re just lucky I ate something and brushed my teeth before I came in here. I’ve had a total of one cavity in my entire life and I’m not breaking that winning streak just because it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

* * *

After dark, Carol knocks on the door and enters the room to find Daryl wide awake with a snoozing Lucy taking a nap in his arms. It makes her smile to see them like that. Lucy ran into the woods to save her daughter from the zombies and Daryl fought tooth and nail to bring Sophia back to her. In her eyes, that makes them perfect for each other. “How’re you feeling?” she asks.

Daryl tugs the blanket up over his back to hide the scars from her. “Not as good as I look,” he deadpans.

Carol sets a tray of food on the bedside table as quietly as humanly possible. “I brought you some dinner,” she says. “You must be starving.” When she hunches to kiss him on the temple, Daryl flinches like a child expecting get hit upside the head before he feels the soft press of her dry lips and seeing that breaks her heart. “You need to know something,” she whispers. “You did more for my little girl today than her own daddy ever did in his whole life.”

Daryl shakes his head slowly. “I didn’t do anythin’ Rick or Shane wouldn’t’ve done,” he mutters.

Carol smiles at him. “I know,” she says. “You’re every bit as good as them…” she squares her shoulders and smiles wider to show him that she means it, “…every bit.”

Daryl cuddles Lucy closer as she drools on his bare chest and smiles crookedly. Maybe one of these days he might actually believe that. Until then, he can try to hope for the best.

Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.


	12. Distant Early Warning

**One, you don’t know everything.**  
**Two, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you.**  
**And three, someone’s getting fucked.**

Mira Grant, _Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 12**  
Distant Early Warning

* * *

_Monday, 23 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 71._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

When day breaks over the pastoral scene of the farmhouse silhouetted in the glow of dawn and casting the chiaroscuro of shadows that sunlight brings, Lucy finds herself wide awake at fuck off o’clock in the morning, an unfortunate side effect of falling asleep before sunset in the arms of a shirtless man who had just kissed her senseless. Lucy is many things—a librarian, an overthinker, a heavyweight in the literal and figural sense of the word, as extra virgin as a bottle of Bertolli—but she’s not a morning person. Still, feeling Daryl snuffle into her hair and squinting to see Romy conked out by the lumps of their feet under the blankets makes a subtle warmth unfurl in her chest like ivy bringing ruins back to life. There are worse ways to wake up, including that one time her older brother Morty dumped a can of frozen pink lemonade down her back, almost punching Cath in the face because she tried to shake her awake the morning after a sleepover, and finding a mouse in bed with her while she lived in the dorms at Mizzou.

 _I like waking up this way_ , Lucy thinks, _in spite of the living dead_.

Daryl groans and buries his face in the soft frizz of her hair as she attempts to extricate herself from his sinewy arms. “Where d’you think you’re goin’?” he asks, his voice deeper than usual and heavy with the dregs of sleep.

Lucy bites her lip and exhales sharply through her nose at the sensation of his breath on her skin. It’s overwhelming to have him so close. After so many years of making herself untouchable, she forgot how to live any other way. It’s time to adapt, to stop being afraid. “I have to pee,” she tells him softly.

Daryl nuzzles the crook of her neck and makes a disgruntled noise low in his throat as she puts her glasses back on. “I don’t wanna let ya’ outta my sight,” he mutters, “last time I did that ya’ got lost in the damn woods.”

Lucy snorts. “I got lost in the woods to save a little girl,” she points out with an edge stubbornness in the slant of her chin. “I regret nothing.”

Daryl watches her shuffle around to where she left her cane propped up against the wall, her limp slightly more visible than usual because she doesn’t have the spoons to hide it. When she leaves the room dressed in nothing but a camisole and floral print leggings, he knows she won’t be out of his sight for long.

After she quietly shuts the door behind her, he looks underneath the blankets at his morning wood and sighs. Romy whines and nudges the quilt covering his ankles with her nose. Daryl squints at the corgi and frowns. “C’mon,” he says, “don’t gimme that look.”

Romy smiles at him with her tongue lolling out of her mouth. Daryl sits up all at once and winces at the stab of pain in his side before he slowly reaches out to scratch her ears.

“I betcha must’ve missed her almost as much as I did,” he says, “ain’t that right?”

Romy boofs happily and licks the heel of his palm. Daryl smiles at the puppy and flops back against the pillows. Lucy, meanwhile, looks at herself in the bathroom mirror while she washes her hands out of habit and notices the hickey on her neck and a burgeoning deep, dark bruise he bit into in the space between her neck and shoulder.

 _I don’t know how I feel about love bites_ , she thinks, _but Daryl stopped as soon as I told him to stop so I do know he won’t hurt me unless I want him to_.

What’s freaky is that she liked the feeling of his teeth sinking into her skin, the sting of sensation a strange mix of pain and pleasure. Lucy blushes all over again just thinking about it, about him and his mouth.

 _Okay_ , she thinks and bites down on the inside of her cheek in a futile attempt to calm her tits, _I’ve got to get my mind out of the gutter. I’m going to cure the zombie virus, one unit of blood at a time_.

* * *

Glenn stares at the barn through a pair of binoculars he borrowed from Shane and swallows around the lump of guilt in his throat. There are zombies locked up within shambling distance of where they’re sleeping, Lori’s pregnant, and he’s keeping too many secrets. It feels like he’s going to explode from the pressure of knowing too much.

“Could you be more obvious?” Maggie snaps at him.

Glenn flinches at the sharp tone of her voice and looks down in a futile attempt to hide the guilt-stricken expression on his face.

Maggie sighs and hands him a bucketful of peaches. “Here,” she huffs, “enjoy.”

Glenn eyes the peaches with the utmost suspicion. “You’re trying to buy my silence with fruit,” he deduces.

“Of course not,” Maggie says indignantly. “There’s also jerky.”

Glenn frowns and takes the bucket from her in spite of the way his stomach is churning, the visceral feeling that something is horribly wrong. “Will you please tell me why your dad has a secret barn full of zombies?” he asks. “It’s creepy. You know that, right?”

“Just trust me on this,” Maggie whispers. “Okay?”

“But I suck at lying,” Glenn whispers back urgently. “I can’t even play poker. It’s too much like lying.”

“You have to keep this to yourself. You have to,” Maggie tells him, “my father’s already pissed off because your friend Lucy has been asking questions. I don’t want to give him another reason to send you away. Please.”

Gert steps out of his tent as the farmer’s daughter walks away. Glenn narrows his eyes at his older sister and hangs his head because he knows what the inquisitive arch of her left eyebrow means. “How much of that did you hear?” he asks.

“Pretty much all of it,” Gert informs him.

Glenn offers her a peach. “You can’t tell anyone,” he says. “Please.”

Gert wordlessly accepts his bribe with one hand and takes a bite as she flicks the brim of his baseball cap with the other.

Glenn winces more out of habit than anything else. “Ouch,” he mumbles even though it didn’t really hurt.

“Get your shit together,” Gert snarks back. “Now isn’t the time to keep secrets.”

* * *

Rick wakes everyone up bright and early for the gun training Shane promised them. Sophia is safe and sound, so the search grid they made out of the map has become irrelevant. Amy draws another two units of blood from Lucy before she piles into the church van with Andrea, T-Dog, Jacqui, Duane, Morgan, Glenn, Gert, Gilda, Cath, and Nico. If things keep going this way, they’re going to need to steal a bus from somewhere.

Jimmy, meanwhile, points out a housing development where they could scavenge more supplies on the survey map to Rick while he waits for Beth to get ready. Hershel gave his consent for Maggie and Beth to learn to shoot once he heard the story of how Gert and Gilda were “claimed” by a group of men who had been planning to gangrape them before they got away. There are worse things in the world than the living dead, and he wants his daughters to be able to protect themselves from all of them.

After she puts a Disney princess band-aid on her left forearm, Lucy shuffles over to the tent Carol shares with Sophia. “Hey,” she ekes the _ey_ sound out awkwardly as Carol smiles at her, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Sure,” Carol says. “Shoot.”

Lucy slants her gaze to Sophia, who’s sitting on the passenger side in the yellow jeep while Maggie, Beth, and Jimmy are squashed into the backseat. “I’m a fourth-degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do and a third-degree blackbelt in Aikido,” she informs her. “Gert’s a Kwan Jang Nim, an eighth-degree blackbelt in Tae Kwon Do and a Grand Master. We’re going to start teaching Sophia to fight. I’m not asking for permission,” she clarifies as the smile that Carol gave her wilts. “Sophia wants to learn, so I’m going to teach her whether you want me to or not. I just thought you should know.”

Carol nods and chews on her lip for a few seconds before she gives Lucy another smile, a fragile one like a sliver of light filtering into a dark room. “Will you teach me, too?” she asks.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “Ed used to hit you,” she says, stating the obvious.

Carol nods again. “Yes, he did.”

Lucy smiles at her without showing her teeth. “Then you’ve already mastered the first lesson that every martial artist has to learn,” she says.

“What lesson is that?” Carol wants to know.

Lucy smiles wider. “How to fall and get back up again,” she informs her.

Carol hugs the librarian so hard she exhales a soft noise that sounds like _oof_. Lucy panics for a fraction of a second at the sudden gush of physical contact before she hugs her back. Carol goes to wait in her car for Rick and Shane to lead the way to the practice range they scoped out during the search for her daughter. Only she’s going to have to wait a little while longer, because Carl got caught with a gun.

Lori opens the chamber of the revolver with a violent clacking noise to see if it’s loaded and clicks it shut before she freaks out. “How the hell did this happen?” she asks.

“Well,” says Dale, “it’s my fault. I let him into the RV because he said he wanted a walkie, that you sent him for one.”

“So,” Lori says, “on top of everything else, he lied. What’s he thinking?”

“He wants to learn how to shoot,” Shane murmurs. “He asked me to teach him. Now, it’s none of my business…” he adds, “…but I’m happy to do it. It’s your call.”

“I’m not comfortable with it,” Lori tells him. Rick flicks his gaze to her before he and Shane exchange a look that says a lot without saying anything at all. “Oh,” she huffs, “don’t make me out to be the unreasonable one here, Rick.”

“I know,” Rick says. “I have my concerns too, but—”

“There’s no but,” Lori cuts him off and snaps at him in a sharp tone of voice that slices through the humid air like a knife. “He was just shot. He’s just back on his feet and he wants a gun?”

“Better than him being afraid of them,” Rick points out. “There are guns in camp for a reason. Carl should learn to handle them safely.”

“I don’t want my kid walking around with a gun,” Lori says.

“But how can you defend that?” Rick wants to know. “We can’t let him go around without protection.”

“He’s as safe as he’ll ever be right here,” Lori says. Rick clenches his jaw around the bad news he hasn’t given her, that Hershel wants them gone. Lori squares her shoulders in a futile attempt to shake off the tension that has been creeping up along her spine ever since she peed on a stick and saw that little pink plus sign. “Look,” she holds up one hand to stop her husband from contradicting her because she doesn’t want to hear it, “everything you’re saying makes perfect sense, but it feels wrong. I didn’t feel good about him following you out into the woods either, and I wish I’d said something. I should’ve gone with my gut.”

Shane watches them as their voices turn hushed and they inexorably start to lean into each other. It’s domestic and heartbreakingly intimate, in a way Lori could never be with him because they didn’t have that kind of history. Shane is starting to get sick of being the third wheel here, starting to wish his best friend had just stayed dead.

“He’s growing up, thank God,” Rick murmurs. “We’ve got to start treating him more like an adult.”

“Then he needs to act like one,” Lori retorts. “He’s not mature enough to handle a gun.”

Lucy snorts at that. “Yes,” she deadpans before she ducks into Daryl’s tent, “because adults never lie. I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.”

“What was that about?” Daryl wants to know.

Lucy folds herself into the chair in one corner of his tent because she doesn’t think she can fit on top of the itty-bitty cot with him. “Lori’s pregnant,” she mumbles.

Daryl squints at her with the scrutiny of a man trying to find a way to ask a skittish woman to get in bed with him that won’t scare her away. “Seriously?”

Lucy ducks her head in a slow nod. “Rick doesn’t know,” she informs him.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Ain’t no way in hell it’s Rick’s,” he mutters.

Lucy shrugs. “Not biologically,” she agrees to disagree, “but a genetic contribution doesn’t necessarily make someone a parent—”

Only she doesn’t get a chance to elaborate on that because Lori interrupts her by yanking the open tent flap aside with a grating shred of nails on vinyl. “I need to talk to you,” she says.

Lucy scoops her cane up from the canvas floor and shuffles outside to sit at the wooden table with her. “I’m not going to spill your secret to anyone else,” she says, “don’t worry.”

“Look,” says Lori in a harsh bite of a whisper, “I know you hate me, but you have no right to tell me how to parent my son.”

Lucy shakes her head slowly but surely. “I don’t hate you,” she informs her.

Lori frowns. “What?” she says.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress. “I don’t hate you,” she echoes awkwardly, “and you’re right. I’m not a parent. I don’t get to have an opinion on how you handle Carl. I’m not going to apologize for calling you a hypocrite, though.”

“Okay,” says Lori because she doesn’t know how else to respond to that. Lucy is abrasive, but she’s not being malicious and she’s not wrong. It’s hypocritical of her to punish Carl for lying when she’s doing the same thing by trying desperately to keep her pregnancy a secret.

“I also don’t think you were doing anything wrong when you were sleeping with Shane,” Lucy tells her matter-of-factly. “You thought Rick was dead. You were trying to stay strong for Carl. You needed someone and Shane was the closest thing to Rick you had. Maybe you fell in love with him. Maybe you just wanted to feel something other than grief. I won’t judge you either way. I do think keeping your pregnancy a secret is stupid and selfish, though, because it’s going to affect everyone in the group sooner or later.”

“How so?” Lori asks.

Lucy shrugs like a crow and hunches one shoulder to meet her earlobe. “You’re going to need baby stuff, medical care, and plenty of food,” she points out. “Who do you think is going to provide all of that? You won’t even go out on a run. You send Glenn and force him to keep secrets for you. You haven’t told Rick because you know this baby isn’t biologically his and you’re scared of what’s going to happen when he finds out. Not to mention what’s going to happen when you tell Shane.”

“How do you do that?” Lori wants to know.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “What?”

“How do you know exactly what I’m feeling?” Lori asks.

Lucy shrugs again. “I’m the spawn of two psychologists,” she informs her. “I’m not good at talking to people, but I do understand them in context.”

“I thought my husband was dead,” Lori murmurs as tears well up and sting the corners of her eyes, “and I felt like I died with him. I wanted to feel something—anything—and now I hate myself for it. Memories are what keep me going now. Memories of what life used to be, and I’ve got a deep well to draw on. I still remember joy, but I think Carl’s well is already running dry and this baby won’t have any good memories at all. Only fear and pain.”

Lucy bites her lip and blushes at the memory of waking up next to Daryl that morning, how overwhelmingly happy she felt in his arms. If the world hadn’t ended, she never would’ve stuck around long enough to meet him. “Maybe clinging to the past is your problem,” she postulates. “I remember what you said around the campfire after Carl was asleep. I know that you weren’t happy with your life or your marriage pre-apocalypse, and those feelings won’t go away just because the dead are walking. Maybe this is your chance to have the conversations with Rick that you couldn’t have before.”

Lori sniffles and swipes at her tears with the back of her hand. “I thought you hated Rick, too.”

Lucy shakes her head again. “Nope,” she says and pops the _p_ sound. “I’m hard on him because every leader needs someone to question their authority. Rick didn’t want to lead the group. All he wanted was to find you, and Carl. I’m just trying to see if your husband can take the pressure of being a leader in this situation before we stop being scared and start thinking about the brave new world we want to create.”

Lori arches her eyebrows at that. “You’re thinking that far ahead?” she asks incredulously.

Lucy chews on her left thumbnail without biting through it before she answers that question. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound once more with feeling. “I can’t go home again, but I can move forward. I felt guilty about that until I realized that my family would never forgive me for dwelling on what horrible things might’ve happened to them instead of being happy.”

“I can’t think like you,” Lori whispers. “I’m terrified of what the future holds. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.”

Lucy muffles a snort of laughter in the palm of her hand. “It’s okay,” she whispers back conspiratorially, “nobody does.”

Unfortunately, their stab at forging an uneasy coexistence into an unlikely friendship is cut short by Kate running into the campsite with a wheelbarrow full of Patricia bleeding profusely from a zombie bite gnawed into the meat of her left ankle.

Lucy rises to her feet and shifts her weight onto her cane with a sigh. _What fresh hell is this?_ she thinks.


	13. Territories

**There we were,**  
**right back where we had started,**  
**we were bumping into each other**  
**in the dark,**  
**and now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know**  
**how to live with each other.**  
**Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another**  
**and shared a blanket,**  
**a spark of kindness made a light;**  
**the light made an opening in the darkness.**

Joy Harjo, “Once the World Was Perfect”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 13**  
Territories

* * *

_Monday, 23 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 71._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

“What the hell?” Lucy asks as Kate stops pushing the wheelbarrow so abruptly that it almost topples over.

“Patricia was feeding chickens to the zombies in the barn,” Kate huffs and puffs. “I followed her because I heard them clucking, and when I caught her in the act she tried to push me over the edge of the loft.”

“ _What_ ,” Lucy says in a sharp, deadly voice that slices through the humid air like a serrated knife.

Patricia flinches at the harsh edge in her tone. “I panicked,” she tries to explain. “I don’t know what came over me. I just got so angry…”

Kate gives Lucy a pointed look. “Remember how you said the latent virus alters the parts of the brain that control emotional responses and impulsive behavior?” she asks. It’s a rhetorical question. Lucy is scatterbrained, but she never forgets information that matters to her. Kate knows that because they’ve been friends for fifteen years.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress. “Let me guess,” she bites out. “Patricia tried to kill you by pushing you over the edge of the loft, you fought back, Patricia lost her balance and toppled over the edge herself, and you pulled her back up because you’re a good person, but not before she got bitten by one of the zombies she was feeding.”

Kate ducks her head and folds her arms tight across her chest as she nods. “Pretty much,” she says.

“Wait,” Lori interjects and holds up one hand as she gives Patricia a look that’s half disbelief and half betrayal. “There are zombies in the barn?”

Patricia swallows thickly. “My son,” she whispers in a trembling voice, “Duncan. Hershel’s wife Annette, his stepson Shawn, his daughters Rachel and Susie, his brother William, his niece Lacey and his nephew Arnold. Jimmy’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fischer. Our friends and neighbors.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek as everything clicks into place in her mind. Hershel is reticent to let them carry guns on his property because he’s trying to protect his zombified family, because he must think they can still be saved. It makes a morbid kind of sense. After all, the C. D. C. never had a chance to broadcast the footage of Candace Jenner amplifying, dying, and reanimating. Hershel must’ve felt the zombies’ hearts beating, must’ve thought a pulse was a sign of life and clung to that fragile gleam of false hope. Never mind the bradycardia. Never mind the lack of higher brain function. Never mind anything that didn’t fit into his worldview.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Lori says solemnly.

Patricia doesn’t say anything. Until that morning, she had thought of zombies as sick people who could be cured. Patricia was a nurse pre-apocalypse—she worked at the hospital that had burned down in the first week of the global outbreak—and she had come to think of those people in the barn as her patients. Then she fell and the rotting corpse of her son took a bite out of her leg, and now she doesn’t know what to believe.

“What are you waiting for?” Lori asks to break the grave silence that ensues, “aren’t you going to cure her?”

Lucy groans internally. “Okay,” she ekes the _oh_ sound out into a frustrated _ooh_ , “I didn’t go around blabbing your secret where everyone could hear. I deserve the same courtesy from you.”

“I heard you tell Daryl,” Lori points out.

Lucy cocks her head in concession. “Yes,” she hisses the sibilant and fizzles out with a sigh, “because I don’t lie to the people that I love, and lying by omission is still a lie—”

Dale chooses that inopportune moment to climb down from where he was keeping watch on the roof of the RV and walk over to stick his nose into this mess. “What’s going on here?” he wants to know.

Lucy heaves another sigh as she turns to look at him over her shoulder. “There are zombies in the barn, Patricia tried to kill my oldest friend before she ironically got bitten, and Lori thinks I should cure her,” she informs him.

“Wait,” Patricia says and winces as she struggles to stand up. “There’s really a cure? You have a cure for this disease?”

Lucy shoots a baleful glare at Lori, who shuts her mouth and holds up her hands in surrender.

“No,” Dale tells her, “she is the cure. Lucy’s immune to the zombie virus.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood as she fights the violent urge to hit Dale in the shins with her cane. Patricia is looking at her with so much raw hope in her eyes, and it makes her want to vomit. Lucy turns on her heels and narrows her eyes at Dale behind her glasses. “You think I’d give my blood to someone who tried to kill one of the only people in this world that I still care about?” she asks in a snarling voice that sounds like a sucker punch. “You’ve got another think coming.”

Dale heaves a sigh of his own and slants his gaze Lori as the librarian shuffles away from them and takes her immunity with her. “I’ll go talk to Hershel,” he grumbles, “see what he has to say about this.”

Lori watches Patricia hobbling awkwardly up the stairs in front of the empty farmhouse, her flesh wound still bleeding profusely and splattering in spurts on the wooden steps. It’s a wound that won’t heal, not as long as she’s infected. “Lucy won’t let anyone die on her watch,” she murmurs, “once she calms down I know she’ll do the right thing.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Dale says.

* * *

After they’ve fired off all the blanks they found at a gun store in Fayetteville on the practice range, Shane and half a dozen others drive to the housing development to scavenge more supplies while Rick packs the arsenal they brought into the back of the yellow jeep. Carl did well enough that he wears the grin of a proud father the whole way back to the farm.

Dale finds Hershel in the stables untacking and grooming the horse that got away. When he brings up the barn, he makes it sound like nobody else knows this secret even though it’s only a matter of time before he spills the beans. Trouble is, this is not going to end well no matter how he slices it. Hershel thinks the zombies in his barn can be saved. There’s no way to prove him wrong that won’t hurt like hell.

Lucy, meanwhile, ducks into Daryl’s tent and taps her earpiece as she flops into the chair with a groan the second time around. “Situation normal,” she deadpans at the pop and fizz of the frequency, “all fucked up.”

S. N. A. F. U. is their version of a red alert, one of the codewords the girls agreed to use in case of emergency before they met Daryl and Glenn and fell in with their fellow survivors. Lucy has them written down in her ever-present listography notebook.

“I’m going to guard the blood bags you left in the cooler,” Kate tells her over the radio, “just in case someone tries to use them without your consent.”

“Wait,” says Nico with a glob of confusion audible in her disembodied voice. “What happened?”

Lucy chews on her fingernails without biting through any of them as Kate explains the debacle in the barn, aware of Daryl staring at her with those intense eyes of his in her periphery. After they reach a consensus on how to handle this steaming pile of shit before it hits the proverbial fan, she taps out of the conversation and slumps in her seat as she exhales all of the air out of her lungs in a soft whoosh.

Daryl puts the arrow he was fidgeting with on the floor next to his cot and squints at her as she meets his eyes, her nostrils flaring anxiously before she smiles at him in the shy way she has that makes his heart stutter deep in his chest. “Hey,” he murmurs. “C’mere.”

Lucy bites her lip and looks away. “I don’t think we can both fit on that cot,” she mumbles.

Daryl snorts. “Sure we can,” he says in a low voice that makes a sweet ache pulse through her. “C’mere.”

Lucy gulps and shuffles over to sit on the edge of the tiny cot before she squishes in next to him, one of his arms scooping around her waist so his hand splays over the curve of her back. Daryl rubs the calloused pad of his thumb over the bend of her spine through her camisole and puts his other hand on the back of her neck before he kisses her again, nibbling and sucking on her bottom lip to coax a moan out of her. Lucy clutches at his shoulder with one hand and tentatively slips the other past where his shirt is half unbuttoned to feel up his bare chest with her fingertips. Daryl growls low in his throat as the heel of her palm skims over one of his flat nipples and kisses her harder, fisting one hand in the hair at the nape of her neck where her braid is loose and licking into her mouth to stroke her tongue with his while he grabs a handful of her fat ass with the other and squeezes hard enough to make her moan again.

When she breaks the kiss, a thin string of saliva hangs in the space between their lips before it snaps. Lucy blushes from the roots of her frizzy hair to the tops of her breasts and looks at him shyly from behind her glasses. “What if I told you that I might be able to convince Hershel to let us stay?” she asks breathlessly.

Daryl shrugs and grits his teeth at the twinge of pain in his side as the movement of his muscles under his skin yanks on his stitches. “I don’t care where we are,” he tells her softly. “I just wanna be with you.”

* * *

When he returns to the farm, Rick meticulously cleans and reloads all of the guns they used at the practice range with bullets that aren’t blanks until Lori stomps over to confront him about something Hershel said to her earlier in the afternoon—that he expects them to leave the farm as soon as possible. After she talks to her husband, she starts to think Lucy was right to call her a hypocrite. Rick isn’t telling her everything, but she’s not being honest with him either.

Maybe things would be easier for everyone if she wasn’t pregnant. Glenn offered to make another run to the pharmacy down the road for her, but she doesn’t want to make him do her dirty work anymore.

When she finds him chopping wood, Lori doesn’t give him a list; instead, she asks Glenn to get Maggie to show her the way. It’s time, she thinks, to start moving forward.

* * *

All hell starts to shake loose after that. Maggie gets attacked in the pharmacy by a zombie that doesn’t stop trying to take a bite out of her even after Glenn chops its head off, and is horrified to learn that her father is dead wrong and that any hope of saving the people in their barn—her stepmother and her stepbrother, her baby sisters, her uncle and her cousins—is lost. Worse, even though she’s only known him for six days, the idea of losing Glenn is already unthinkable to her.

Lori throws up the abortion pills she took at the last second because things might be easier if she wasn’t pregnant, but that doesn’t matter because at the end of the day she wants to have this baby; wants to move forward with her marriage to Rick and see if they can fix the marital problems they had pre-apocalypse. Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s her choice to make.

Rick finds the boxes of pills on the table in their tent after dinner and confronts her about her choice on the dusty road between the campsite and a pen that holds a herd of grazing cattle, where everyone can overhear them screaming at each other.

Hershel, meanwhile, goes looking for Lucy and knocks on the door of her trailer. “We need to talk,” he tells her solemnly.

“Okay,” Lucy awkwardly ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_. “Let’s talk.”

Hershel steps inside her trailer and eyes the arsenal of military-grade weaponry stacked on the floor next to her mattress. “I think we got off on the wrong foot yesterday,” he murmurs.

Lucy scoffs. “I don’t think so,” she retorts. “I think you want something from me and you’ve forgotten how to talk to women who don’t feel the need to respect you until you’ve earned it.”

Hershel sighs. “What makes you think you’re immune?” he asks.

“I don’t think I’m immune,” Lucy informs him. “I know it the only way a scientist can know anything: by doing an experiment ad nauseam in order to replicate the results.” At that, she holds up both of her forearms to show him all the scars like teeth permanently etched into her skin. “I’ve survived four zombie bites without amplifying so far,” she clarifies. “I have no viral symbionts in my system, but I do have cytotoxic T lymphocytes that allow me to survive being exposed to a live state infection without my body responding to the virus with fatal hypercytokinemia. Which is why a transfusion of my blood can be a curative, in the event that whoever gets the transfusion has been infected with the live strain of the virus. I haven’t found a way to inoculate people so they can replicate my immunoresponse without my blood in their system, though. Yet.”

“So your blood is a cure for those who have already been infected,” Hershel deduces.

Lucy ducks her head in a slow nod. “How much has Rick told you about everything we went through before we got here?” she wants to know.

“Not much,” Hershel tells her tersely.

“Rick was in a coma until a week and a half ago,” Lucy explains, “he went looking for Lori and Carl in Atlanta and he met Glenn, who brought him to where our group was camped out at Bellwood Quarry. After that, a horde of zombies came in the middle of the night and thirteen people died. Rick suggested we go to the C. D. C. and we met a man named Dr. Edwin Jenner, who gave me a portable hard drive with all of the information the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control had on the zombie virus.”

At that, she shuffles over to where she left her laptop on her bed and clicks on a video file. Hershel frowns, a dour shadow that makes the lines on his face look more austere.

“I’m going to show you something they never had a chance to show on the news,” Lucy tells him softly. “This is the brain of Dr. Candace Jenner, the immunologist who discovered the viral pathogen that wiped out most of the people on the planet,” she taps the screen as the brain goes pitch dark and only its stem and cerebellum restarts. “This is her brain on zombification. I know you think the people infected with the live virus are sick in a way that can be treated, but you’re wrong. This,” she taps the screen again, “isn’t up for debate. It’s a scientific fact. Their brains don’t function beyond the brainstem and the cerebellum. Their hearts beat at a rate too slow to keep a sick person alive. Their bodies are decomposing. I agree with you that they’re people, but you’re refusing to acknowledge that they’re dead. What you’re doing isn’t going to save the ones you love. It’s keeping the monster that killed them alive.”

Hershel shakes his head so fast he almost discombobulates himself. “I don’t have to listen to this,” he says in a voice that shakes with raw fear.

Lucy sighs. “How much is the cure worth to you?” she asks.

Hershel narrows his eyes at her before he answers her question with another question. “What do you want?” he asks sourly.

“I want you to let us stay here until Daryl’s wound is healed,” Lucy answers with a stubborn tilt of her chin that lets him know she isn’t open to negotiation.

“It could take months for a wound like that to heal completely,” Hershel points out.

“I know,” Lucy says. “I want you to extend your hospitality for the next six months.”

Hershel frowns again at that. After a long day of doing chores he hasn’t done in years and mulling over all of the ways things could go wrong in this situation, he’s too frayed to fight her on this. “You drive a hard bargain,” he murmurs.

“There’s nothing left, Hershel,” Lucy informs him, “no civilization, no government, no military, no cops, no law and no order. You’re lucky the group of rapists Gert and Gilda met hasn’t come through here, lucky that we found out about the zombies in the barn and not Shane or things would’ve escalated into a good old-fashioned shoot ’em up by now. You’re lucky Rick would never think of trying to take your farm by force. You’re outnumbered, outgunned, and outsmarted. You don’t have the power here, and the systemic power structures in our society that protected men like you for centuries are gone. You’re the one with everything to lose, not me. Whether you want to acknowledge that or not is up to you.”

Hershel makes a disgruntled noise low in his throat. It’s obvious these people have no intention of leaving him and his family in peace, but at least they’ve been willing to play by his rules so far. “Give me the cure,” he says.

Lucy smiles at him, vicious and caustic. “Ask nicely,” she retorts.

Hershel sighs. “Please,” he says. Lucy flails one hand at her mini-cooler. Hershel flips open the lid and finds two units of chilled blood inside. “Thank you,” he says. Like he actually means it.

“You’re welcome,” Lucy mutters before he steps out of her trailer and shuts the door behind him.

Hershel still thinks he knows better, that he can save the living dead people in his barn.

What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Yet.


	14. High Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : There is some mild smut in the last scene of this chapter—specifically Daryl eating Lucy out in the stables—so those of you who are underage or a friend of mine IRL are reading this at your own risk. Beware.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Neck Kissing, Oral Sex, Cunnilingus.

**Now if you would just fuck me**  
**the way you look at me**  
**I might actually have something**  
**to believe in.**

Ashe Vernon, “As If in Prayer”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 14**  
High Water

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

When the morning comes, Lucy wakes up alone in her trailer and thinks everything that happened between her and Daryl might’ve been a dream before she touches the bruise he left on her clavicle with two fingers and smiles to herself like a doofus in love at the end of the world. There’s a series of experiments to test whether or not periodic injections of her blood can induce her immunoresponse to the zombie virus in those infected with the latent viral strain written out in her composition notebook on the pillow by her head, but she has a hunch that injections of her blood aren’t going to work as a permanent solution. What she needs are vaccine components—adjuvants, diluents, additives, preservatives—and a medical research lab with the equipment to synthesize a vaccine out of those components. Which is a tall order in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but using her unique antibodies to induce adaptive immunity in others is just crazy enough to work.

 _Hershel was a veterinarian pre-apocalypse_ , she thinks, _and Patricia was a nurse. If anyone here might know where I can find everything I need to make the cure into less of a crapshoot, it’s them_.

After she gets out of the shower and puts on a clean black dress over a soft prison-striped t-shirt with sleeves that go almost to her elbows, Lucy shuffles out of her trailer and goes to see what’s for breakfast with her revolvers fully loaded and holstered to the belt around her waist. Rick can’t make her cater to the whims of a stubborn old man who keeps the living dead locked in his barn; and he can pry her guns out of her cold, dead hands. Daryl is carrying too, if the pucker in the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back is any indication.

There are plastic lawn chairs, metal foldout chairs with canvas seats, and wooden Adirondack chairs scattered around the firepit they dug in the middle of their campsite. Andrea, Amy, Jacqui, Duane, Morgan, and T-Dog are sitting at the weathered old wooden table in the shade of the sugar maple trees. Gilda is sharpening her knife with graceful scrapes of the blade against the oilstone while Gert munches on the omelette she made and Glenn slants his gaze to the farmhouse where Maggie is watching him from the wraparound porch. Dale is standing by the empty clothesline watching him watch her with a dour expression on his face. Rick, Lori, and Carl are clumped together with their plates on their laps and if anyone cared to look at the former sheriff, they would see a foreboding heaviness in the slump of his shoulders and fear tucked into the corners of his frown—and even if she hadn’t overheard them arguing, Lucy still would’ve known Lori told Rick about her pregnancy just by looking at him.

Kate is frying bacon from the giant cooler in the back of the jeep in a pan while Cath waves to Lucy and Nico sneaks a glance at Shane, who’s eating by himself in the shadow of a tall and spindly tree. Lucy waves back to Cath with a gnarling flutter of her fingers before she flops into the chair next to Daryl with a smile that doesn’t show her teeth. Carol puts a plate of scrambled eggs in front of her with a smile of her own and goes to sit by Sophia.

“Hey,” Daryl murmurs around a mouthful of eggs, “I missed ya’ last night.”

Lucy blushes at the sight of him eating with his hands and licking his fingers clean. It makes her think about those fingers and that mouth of his in a new context, one that isn’t appropriate for breakfast. Only she doesn’t get a chance to dwell on that because of what happens next.

Glenn stands up and squares his shoulders as everyone turns to look at him. “Um, guys…” he says and clears his throat awkwardly before he bites the bullet, “…the barn is full of zombies.”

* * *

There are moans wafting ominously through the humid air that get louder the closer they get to the barn. Lucy shuffles out of a wheat field where the stalks are taller than she is and flips her braid over her shoulder with a huff. Shane goes to peer in through a crack in the weathered wooden walls of the barn and he almost jumps out of his skin at the sight of a zombie peering back at him. “Rick,” he says and clenches his teeth around the words, “you cannot tell me you’re alright with this.”

“No,” Rick tells him with an edge of discomfort in his voice caused by the tension that hangs between them, “I’m not, but we’re guests here. This isn’t our land.”

“This is our lives,” Morgan retorts.

Andrea nods. “We can’t just sweep this under the rug,” she adds.

“It ain’t right,” T-Dog murmurs, “not remotely.”

Shane frowns and paces back and forth erratically as he tries to think of something. “Okay,” he says, “we’ve either gotta go in there and we’ve gotta make things right, or we’ve just gotta go.”

“Nope,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “we’re not going anywhere. I gave Hershel two units of my blood yesterday in exchange for him letting us stay on his land through the winter.”

“It’s only a matter of time before he tries to transfuse one of the zombies in the barn,” Nico points out, “and we all know how that’s going to end. Once he’s proven wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt, I don’t think he’s going to stop us from doing what needs to be done.”

“What if they get out and come for us while we wait, while we’re sleeping?” Shane asks in a sharp tone of voice that slices like the blade of a knife. “Lucy, you don’t have enough blood in you to save us all if the same thing that happened at the quarry happens here. I ain’t gonna risk my life based on what you and your friends think.”

Daryl sneers at him. “Hey,” he says gruffly, “don’t you talk to her that way.”

Shane clenches his jaw and sneers back. “What,” he says and slants his gaze to Lucy, “you need your methed out boyfriend to fight your battles for you?”

Lucy adjusts her glasses before she falls into a flèche and hits him in the throat with the handle of her cane. When he splutters and gasps for lack of air, she knocks him on his ass into the dirt and dry grass and hobbles to stand over him with her machete at his throat. “I’m a blackbelt in two different styles of martial arts,” she informs him with a vicious bite of sweetness in her voice. “I’ve also studied épée fencing, archery, and Krav Maga. I don’t need anyone to fight my battles for me. I’ve been protecting myself for a long time. Now,” she cocks her head and tilts her machete so the sharp edge kisses the jut of his Adam’s apple but doesn’t put quite enough pressure on his skin to draw blood, “apologize to Daryl. I get that you’re getting angry because that’s a hell of a lot easier than being afraid, but taking your anger out on him isn’t going to make you feel better or solve the problem at hand.”

“Yeah,” Daryl mutters as heat crawls up the back of his neck because Lucy protecting him is hotter than it probably should be, “and not that it’s any of your damn business, but I quit cold turkey. I’ve been clean for almost two months.”

Shane arches his eyebrows at that as Lucy steps back to give him some breathing room. “Shit,” he says. “I’m sorry, man. I didn’t know.”

“Just let me talk to Hershel,” Rick interjects as soon as his best friend is back on his feet and the palpable tension has bled out of the air, “let me figure this out.”

Shane glares at him. “What’re you gonna figure out?” he wants to know.

“If we’re gonna clear the barn,” Rick says urgently, “I have to talk him into it. This is his land.”

“Hershel sees those things in there as people,” Dale points out, “sick people. His wife. His daughters. His stepson.”

“You knew?” Rick snaps with an incredulous sting of betrayal in his voice.

Kate folds her arms and nods. “Dale talked to Hershel yesterday,” she explains, “after I caught Patricia feeding live chickens to the zombies in the barn and that bitch tried to kill me.”

“You knew and you waited until now to tell us,” Jacqui says flatly.

“I thought we could survive one more night,” Dale tells her, “and we did. I was waiting ’til this morning to say something, but Glenn wanted to tell you himself.”

“Hershel’s crazy, Rick!” Shane hollers at the top of his lungs, “the man is crazy if he thinks those things are alive!”

Sophia wails as the zombies in the barn scratch and shove at the wooden door, the chains held together by a clunky padlock clanking while the hinges groan like something out of a horror movie.

Lucy sighs. _I have a bad feeling about this_ , she thinks.

* * *

When she knocked Shane on his ass, Lucy had known that she wouldn’t be able to put any weight on her ankle in the aftermath without hurting herself. It’s petty, but that gobsmacked look he gave her once he realized he got his ass kicked by a crippled girl was worth the pain. While her badassery isn’t sustainable because of her disability, she can still make a man think twice about underestimating her.

Lucy was planning on taking a nap in her trailer with her ankle elevated until Sophia comes knocking on her door, her fist a timid resonance. Sophia doesn’t say anything once the door swings open; she just takes Lucy by the hand and drags her to the stables.

Carol is standing in the dirt hallway by the tack room with her arms folded tight across her chest and a thread of worry in the slump of her shoulders. Daryl hunches over a saddle stand like it hurts to breathe, his knuckles clenched white on the cantle as his nostrils flare with every excruciating exhale. Carol squares her shoulders and speaks up. “You can’t go,” she tells him urgently.

“I’m fine,” Daryl snarls at her.

“Hershel said you need to heal,” Carol says.

“Yeah.” Daryl grunts and goes to grab the bridle hanging on the hook in front of the closest stall. “I don’t care.”

“Well,” Carol retorts as she watches him put the bridle on the horse, “I do.”

“I ain’t gonna sit around ’n do nothin’,” Daryl says and gnashes his teeth around the words.

Carol unfolds her arms. “No,” she murmurs sourly. “You’re gonna go out there and get yourself hurt even worse.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and sneers at her before he shoves the saddle into the dirt and hisses at the stab of pain in his side where the motion tugs on his stitches.

Carol watches him stumble in horror. “Daryl,” she says, “are you alright?”

“Just leave me be!” Daryl growls as he hunches on instinct to protect the parts of him that are raw and vulnerable. “Stupid bitch.”

 _Okay_ , Lucy thinks as she hobbles into the stables to stop him, _enough_. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asks.

“I’m sorry,” Carol mumbles, “I was just—”

Lucy shakes her head slowly. “Carol,” she cuts in, “you have nothing to apologize for. I was talking to Daryl.”

“I’m goin’ on a hunt,” Daryl says in answer to her question as soon as Carol and Sophia are gone.

Lucy scoffs. “I think fucking not,” she deadpans.

Daryl narrows those intense eyes of his at her. “What’re you gonna do, huh?” he asks, “you gonna knock me on my ass like you did Shane?”

Lucy shuffles through the dirt to look him in the eyes and touches his face with both hands, the heels of her palms soft in contrast to the grit of stubble on his cheeks. “I love you,” she tells him in a voice that shakes with enough force to move the earth. “I’m in love with you, and if you go off and get hurt or killed out of some twisted need to prove to yourself that you’re good enough without even considering my feelings, I will never forgive you.”

It takes him a few seconds to process her words, and Daryl squints at her as warmth unfurls in his chest like fractals of light that shine through obvoluted leaves in the forest. There’s still a small, fragile part of him that can’t believe how lucky he is to have her—and that part of him doesn’t even care that the world had to end so they could find each other.

Daryl pushes her up against the door to one of the empty foaling stalls with his whole body, and Lucy panics about the possibility of splinters for a fraction of a second because he grabs her wrists and pins her hands to the wood above her head before he kisses her hard and rough and desperate. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” he tells her between kisses. “I love you, too.”

Lucy kisses him back and sucks on his upper lip before she licks between his upper lip and his teeth to tease his tender frenulum with her tongue. Daryl thumbs the bruise he left on her clavicle possessively before he moves his mouth to her neck and nips at where her pulse is thumping wildly under her skin. When he shoves his hand between her legs, Daryl growls low in his throat because she’s wearing shorts under her dress. Lucy spreads her thighs apart because she wants him to touch her, wants him so badly she aches deep inside.

Daryl pops the button on her shorts and undoes her zipper with a sharp tug before he slips his hand down into her panties. “ _Shit_ ,” he hisses and rubs one of his calloused fingertips over her slit in a frenzied caress that makes her moan softly, “you’re so wet already.”

Lucy shrugs. “Sometimes it’s like a geyser down there,” she mumbles. “Sometimes it’s like a desert. Vaginas are weird that way.”

Daryl snorts and lets her wrists go before he gets on his knees in front of her to yank her shorts and panties down. When he scoops her left knee over his shoulder and nuzzles the inside of her thigh, her breath hitches in her throat as her pussy throbs in anticipation of what she thinks he might do next. Daryl glances up and holds her gaze while he kisses the inside of her thigh and sucks on the soft flesh hard enough to bruise.

Lucy knows this is him giving her a chance to say no instead of taking her spread legs and her wet pussy as consent, and that more than anything else shows her that she made the right choice in choosing to let herself love him.

Daryl watches her lift her skirt with his pupils blown wide and swallows hard as his dick twitches in his jeans. “You sure?” he asks.

Lucy bites her lip and nods, a sharp descent of her chin. Truth be told, she’s never been more sure of anything in her life. “Yes,” she tells him softly. “I’m sure. I trust you.”

Daryl inhales deeply through his nose and groans at the mouthwatering scent of her sweat mixing with a tart smell that can only be described as horny, wet pussy. If she were anyone else he’d be inside her by now—most of the sex he had before was all _wham, bam, thank you ma’am_ because he almost never let the people he fucked get close enough to see the scars on his back or worm their way into his heart—but she’s Lucy and he loves her so much it scares him shitless and she’s a virgin and he wants to make her feel better than any other man ever has. Daryl slowly rubs the rough pad of his thumb up and down her slit before he spreads her open, the plump lips of her labia soft and slick with her arousal. When he strokes her cunt with slow drags of his tongue, she whimpers and bucks her hips helplessly against his face. Daryl puts his hands on her hips and pins her to the wood behind her before he nuzzles the damp curls of her pubic hair and flicks his tongue into her, swirling around her hole and guzzling her sweet and sour juices like a starving man satisfying a primal craving. “You taste so damn good,” he says in a raw voice.

Lucy shudders at the sensation of his breath on her skin and in the heat of the moment she can’t help but moan his name. “Daryl…”

“You like that?” Daryl tugs her clit between his teeth and sucks hard enough to make her grab his hair. “How ’bout this?”

Lucy slaps her other hand up over her mouth to muffle the scream he tears out of her with the delicious scrape of his teeth. Daryl hums against her and the smug noise he makes buzzes through her body to amplify the perfect motion of his tongue on her, _in_ her. Lucy keeps her hand clasped over her mouth to muffle another scream because he gives her clit a rough lick and he doesn’t stop until she comes so hard she feels like crying, her thighs trembling as she lets a broken sound bubble up from somewhere deep in her chest to fall out of her mouth. Daryl almost comes in his pants from the glut of her on his tongue and rises to his feet before he kisses her again with the taste of her in his mouth, squeezing her voluptuous ass with one hand while he gets his dick out of his jeans with the other and ruts against her like some wild animal.

“Oh, crap.” Lucy opens her eyes and freaks out because the stickiness of his blood is oozing through his shirt and seeping into the fabric of her dress. “Daryl, stop…” she gasps and whimpers as the blunt head of his cock glosses over her swollen clit, “…you’re bleeding. I think you ripped your stitches.”

Daryl slumps to nuzzle the crook of her neck and puts his weight on her to feel her body flush against his from hip to chest. “Yeah,” he mutters, “pretty sure I ripped ’em liftin’ the saddle.”

“Okay,” Lucy says and shoves at his shoulder as she ekes the _oh_ sound out into a frustrated _ooh_ , “put your dick back in your pants and let’s go find Hershel. I don’t want you bleeding all over me during our first time.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and tries not to look too disappointed. When he licks his lips, he grins because he can still taste her horny pussy. Hell, he can smell how wet she is even after he steps back to zip up his jeans. “Yes ma’am,” he drawls in a low voice that makes her blush as she finagles her shorts back on.

Lucy shuffles over and puts one hand on his shoulder for balance while she goes on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his mouth, softly. “I love you,” she whispers shyly. Almost like she thinks he might not want to hear it again.

Daryl swallows hard as his heart stutters deep in his chest. There’s a special place in hell for whoever hurt her before she was his. “Good,” he whispers back gruffly, “’cause I love you, too.”


	15. The Twilight Zone

**Take the boy**  
**out of the country. Kill**  
**two birds. Save nine. Walk**  
**a mile. Unto. It is better**  
**to give. It is better to grieve.**  
**It is better to receive. The hand**  
**that feeds you**  
**must come down.**  
**The bite is worse.**

Daphne Gottlieb, “Adage”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 15**  
The Twilight Zone

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips as the pain in her ankle overshadows the afterglow of her orgasm and disquiet creeps back inside to occupy the dark corners of her mind. There’s no shame in doing what she did with Daryl, and she has no doubt that he meant it when he said he loves her—she isn’t so oblivious that she could miss how much he wanted her when his dick was hard and hot between her thighs, or how he ate her out like making her come for him was an end in itself, or how he almost died trying to find her when she was lost in the woods—but her anxiety isn’t going to leave her alone just because she fell in love.

Daryl squints at her over his shoulder, torn between the urge to take her hand and his gut instinct telling him that she feels too overwhelmed for more touching right now. “You okay?” he asks quietly, his voice taut with pain.

Lucy chews on the inside of her cheek in a futile attempt to stop overthinking. “I’ve never had an orgasm with anyone else before,” she tells him shyly, “you’re the first.”

Daryl glances down, but he can’t hide the shit-eating grin on his face. Or pussy-eating grin, if you want to get technical. “Yeah,” he says gruffly, “and I’m gonna be the last.”

Lucy blushes from the roots of her frizzy hair to the hollow between her breasts. It might’ve sounded like a threat if any other guy were saying that to her, but those words sound like a promise coming from him—one that she wants him to keep. “Shane called you my boyfriend,” she murmurs, “is that what this is?”

Daryl nods. “I’m yours for as long as you want me,” he says, “the way I see it, that means you’re mine.”

There’s a crucial difference between him wanting to own her and them belonging to each other, choosing each other. Lucy smiles and slips her free hand into the crook of his elbow, skimming her fingertips over his forearm to where his hand is tucked in the pocket of his jeans. Daryl lets her take his hand out of his pocket and interlaces his fingers with hers as they walk up the steps to the backdoor of the farmhouse. Lucy cocks her head as she watches him open the door for her and squeezes his fingers. “I am, you know,” she tells him softly, steering into the skid.

Daryl squints at her as she hobbles inside and shuts the door behind her. “What?” he asks.

Lucy bites her bottom lip before she tugs him down the hall towards the sound of two voices arguing. “I’m yours,” she answers.

* * *

Shane puts groups of two people on watch at the barn for an hour at a time while Rick tries to talk Hershel into changing his worldview. Morgan tells Hershel the story of how he almost lost Duane because he couldn’t bring himself to shoot the woman he loved even after she died in his arms, but that story only strengthens his conviction to keep holding onto the loved ones he’s already lost.

Nico perches on the seat of a tractor burnished with rust that creeps over the metal like corrosive moss. Shane glances at her sidelong and leans against the back end of the machine while she uses her knife to slice an apple. When he opens his mouth, whatever he was about to say gets stomped on by Rick walking over to where they’re watching the barn and waiting for something to go horribly wrong. Shane clears his throat awkwardly as his best friend comes to stand next to him with a fraught expression on his face and deep furrows in his forehead. “What’s it gonna be, man?” he asks even though he thinks he already knows the answer to that question. “Which way does this thing go?”

“I don’t know yet,” Rick tells him.

“What did Hershel say?” Nico wants to know.

“We’re negotiating,” Rick says without elaborating further. Which isn’t much of an answer to her question, and that makes Nico think Lucy is right. Rick can’t stop thinking like he did before, like a man who has always followed the rules instead of making them. Whether that quality is a strength or a weakness in this situation remains to be seen.

Shane frowns. Apparently he isn’t satisfied with a non-answer, either. “Clock’s ticking, Rick,” he says.

“No, it isn’t, Shane,” Rick snaps back at him with an edge of exasperation in his voice, “the barn is secure. We didn’t even know about it until this morning.”

 _Lucy did_ , Nico thinks, _she found out about it yesterday because Kate almost died in there. We can’t let something like that happen again_. “We know about it now,” she points out. “We know that over a dozen zombies are in there.”

“We know it’s about a stone’s throw from our camp, Rick, from where we sleep,” Shane adds, “so, look, if we’re not gonna go in there and clear it out, then we’ve just gotta go.”

“We’re not going to clear it out and we’re not going to go,” Rick tells him. “You heard what Lucy said, that she got Hershel to agree to let us stay through the winter. This is our chance to show him that we can survive together. We can’t fuck that up.”

“We at least need our guns,” Shane says.

Rick shakes his head. “We can’t have them,” he says, “not here.”

Shane narrows his eyes at his best friend. “Why do you want to stay here even though it’s not safe?” he asks.

Rick swallows hard. “We can make it safe,” he says urgently.

“How are we going to do that?” Nico wants to know.

“We will,” Rick says. “Okay?”

Shane huffs. “No, man,” he snarls. “It’s not—”

“Shane!” Rick shouts. “Lori’s pregnant!”

Shane lets his mouth hang wide open for a few seconds while his stomach drops tight and the world spins off its axis at this revelation. Until that moment he thought he didn’t have a chance with Lori because he couldn’t even begin to compete with the man that she married, the father of her son. Only now he knows the woman he loves is going to have a baby and there is every chance that her baby is his, too, and that packs enough of a punch to knock the words he was going to say right out of his throat.

“We need to stay,” Rick tells him quietly.

“We need our guns,” Shane retorts in a soft voice that stumbles over itself.

Rick shakes his head again. “No,” he says, “I can work this out.”

Nico watches Rick walking back to where the farmhouse looms in the harsh daylight. Shane isn’t looking at either of them and even though it hurts to know he only has eyes for Lori, she doesn’t have any regrets about rebounding with him. Unlike him, Nico knows when it’s time to move on.

Rick turns on his heels and looks back at his best friend, the man who fell in love with his wife before he came back from the dead. “You good?” he asks even though he already knows the answer.

“Yeah.” Shane grunts halfheartedly and puts on a semblance of a smile. “Lori’s having a baby, man!” he says and tries not to let the words turn to ash on his tongue. “Congratulations.”

Rick smiles back like this isn’t the end of the world. “Thank you.”

* * *

Lucy strips out of the shirt that she wore under her dress without undressing herself—a trick she learned as a fat girl in junior high who didn’t want to change in front of the skinny bitches in the locker room during gym class—to check for bloodstains while Hershel removes the sutures that Daryl tore and sews him back up. After the doctor cuts the last stitch, Daryl thanks him with a grunt before he grits his teeth and rises to his feet. Lucy stares at him with her gray eyes wide behind her glasses while he tilts her chin up and kisses her on the cheek with dry lips, gentle and intolerably soft. After that, he goes to apologize to Carol for calling her a bitch.

 _Things aren’t what you think they are_ , Lucy had overheard Maggie say before the farmer’s daughter left the sunlit kitchen they’re sitting in, _they aren’t. This isn’t about me and Glenn. It’s not about me and you. It’s about you. It’s about who you are, and who you’re gonna be_.

“What’s your plan?” she wants to know.

Hershel turns to look at her while he rolls the sleeves of his white dress shirt back down over his forearms. “What?” he asks.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and forces herself to look him in the eyes. “You heard me,” she says. “You have all the answers, right? You must have a plan for those zombies in your barn.”

Hershel narrows his eyes at her. “I don’t like your tone,” he tells her.

Lucy snorts. “I don’t like you trying to silence me just because I’m saying what you don’t want to hear,” she deadpans, “but I’m going to keep talking until you listen. Nobody is coming to save you. There’s only me and my hard drive full of research data and my natural immunity to this plague. I’m the last woman standing between our species and extinction…” she bites down on the inside of her cheek and clenches her fist around the handle of her cane before she adds, “…I’m the meek that shall inherit the earth.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hershel says, his voice flat and hollow. “You’re just a girl.”

“I’m the girl who’s going to cure the zombie virus,” Lucy retorts. “You’re the one who doesn’t know shit.”

Jimmy breaks the awkward silence that ensues a few seconds later when he flings the backdoor open and thoughtlessly slams it against the wall before he careens into the kitchen. “Hershel!” he shouts. “It happened again!”

Lucy flinches with her whole body at the noise. _What fresh hell is this?_ she thinks.

Hershel sighs and rolls his sleeves back up. “You want to know what my plan is?” he asks. “Wait ’til we get back, and I’ll show you.”

* * *

Hershel has a plan: he finds zombies in the wild, brings them shambling and yowling back to the barn, and locks them in. It’s simple, and shortsighted. Not to mention dangerous. While he takes Rick out into the woods to drag two zombies out of the creek, Shane does his damnedest to convince Lori the baby growing inside of her is his too. It doesn’t work, but he never expected to win that argument. It’s time to let his trigger finger do the talking, to let his actions speak louder than words, to show Lori that he can keep her and Carl safe better than Rick ever could.

After he finds out that Dale went off with their guns, things escalate quickly. Shane stomps through the forest to where Dale was about to hide their arsenal by a tree in the middle of a brackish swamp and calls his bluff when the old man aims the rifle he had slung over his shoulder at him. Dale was a car salesman who had lived a Pleasantville kind of life until his wife was diagnosed with cancer; he isn’t capable of killing a man in cold blood, or adapting to survive in this situation. Shane had known that going in.

“This world,” Dale tells him in a voice that quakes like a judgment handed down from on high, “what it is now. This is where you belong. I may not have what it takes to last for long, but that’s okay because at least I can say when the world goes to shit I didn’t let it take me down with it.”

“Fair enough,” Shane retorts before he turns on his heels and walks out of the woods with the bag of guns.

* * *

Lucy is sitting in a folding chair by the barn rereading the first book in a series of paranormal romance novels about a librarian who gets turned into a vampire when she looks up and sees two ensnared zombies being dragged out of the woods by Jimmy, Hershel, and Rick. _Oh, crap_ … she thinks as the others come running from the lawn in front of the farmhouse with semiautomatic rifles and pump-action shotguns in hand.

“What the hell’re you doing?” Shane asks.

“Shane, just back off!” Rick shouts at him as the zombies start yowling at the smell of more fresh meat.

“Why do your people have guns?” Hershel wants to know.

Shane gnashes his teeth and jabs a finger at the dead things ensnared by the farmer and the former sheriff. “You see?” he yells. “You see what they’re holding onto?”

“I see who I’m holding onto,” Hershel yells back at him.

“No, man.” Shane exhales in a huff and shakes his head. “You don’t.”

“Shane,” Rick says as he shoves the struggling zombie forward in shambles, “just let us do this and then we can talk.”

“What the hell do you wanna talk about, Rick?” Shane asks. “These things ain’t sick, they’re not people,” he shouts, “they’re dead! We ain’t gotta feel nothing for ’em ’cause all they do, they kill! These things right here,” he slants his gaze to Jacqui, “they’re the things that killed Jim, they killed Otis, they’re gonna kill all of us!”

“Shane,” Rick screams as the zombie he ensnared claws at the air, “shut up!”

“Hey,” Shane trudges in front of the zombie that had been a woman who grew sweet corn before she died and draws the handgun he was carrying at the small of his back, “Hershel, man, lemme ask you something. Could a living, breathing person just walk away from this?” At that, he pulls the trigger and fires three shots. “That’s three rounds in the chest,” he clarifies as congealed blood splatters on the airy white material of its dress. “Could someone who’s alive just take that? Why is it still coming?” At that, he fires two more shots through its ribs as it tries to scratch him with its rigorous hands. “That’s its heart,” he says, “its lungs. Why is it still coming?”

“Shane,” Rick snaps. “Enough.”

“You’re right, man.” Shane nods curtly and stomps over to shoot the zombie in the head. “Enough living next to a barn full of things that’re trying to kill us,” he says and glances at Lucy as the shot he fired ricochets through the humid air. “Rick, it ain’t like it was before!” he yells. “You know what happens when you give one of these things her blood. You’ve seen it. You know it’s a waste to try to cure ’em when a bullet’ll get the job done. I’m not gonna let Lucy waste a single drop trying to keep us safe from this shortsighted man and his inability to let things go…” he flicks his gaze to Hershel before he shifts his focus to the others, “…now if y’all wanna live, if you wanna survive, you gotta fight for it! I’m talking about fighting right here, right now!”

“Hershel,” Rick says in a voice that trembles with terror, “take the snare pole. Hershel, listen to me, man, take it now. Please! Hershel, take it—”

Shane runs to break the lock on the door and lets the chains slither into the dirt. Rick keeps shouting at him to stop while Lori tells Carl to get behind her, Morgan hangs back to stand with Duane, and Carol thanks God that Sophia is alive to hold her hand. Hershel falls to his knees even though he can’t find the words to pray. Maggie digs her fingernails into his shoulders, but he doesn’t seem to feel it. Shane watches the horde of zombies that Hershel was collecting shamble out into the sunlight with his finger on the trigger. Amy shoots a blonde zombie with pigtails in the forehead while Andrea draws her own gun. It only takes a few seconds for those with a weapon in hand to form a firing squad. Shane glances over his shoulder and narrows his eyes at Rick before he turns to shoot the zombie he ensnared right through the cranium and turns back to the problem at hand. It’s pandemonium, a cacophony of screams and gunfire that makes all of the birds within earshot take flight.

Lucy shifts her weight onto her cane as she takes her place in the firing squad beside Daryl, slips her finger onto the trigger of her revolver, and shoots the last zombie standing between its bulbous eyes. When the final shot rings out, the noise from the nozzle of her .38 Special makes such an almighty sound.

 _This is the way the world ends_ , she thinks, _not with a whimper, but a bang_.


	16. Faithless

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Watch [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewfePPj342M) if you want to know why combat arms earplugs are a vital part of any survival kit in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

**Take a body, dump it, drive.**  
**Take a body, maybe your own, and dump it gently.**  
**All your dead, unfinished selves and dump them gently.**  
**Take only what you need.**

Richard Siken, “Birds Hover the Trampled Field”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 16**  
Faithless

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Lucy extracts her earplugs in the aftermath of the shootout and puts them back in the pocket of her dress as the sound of Beth sobbing echoes shrilly in her unprotected ears. After they scavenged the upper levels of the C. D. C. for supplies and found a few boxes of combat arms earplugs still encased in plastic, she and Daryl passed them out like Halloween candy because gunshots can be loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss and no one wants to lose their hearing in the apocalypse if they can help it. Daryl puts his earplugs in the back pocket of his jeans and squints at her sidelong before he slips an arm around her shoulders and pulls her flush against his side—the side he didn’t skewer, that is. Lucy clicks the safety on and snaps her revolver into its holster while he tucks her under his sinewy arm, where she feels incongruously safe in spite of the dead bodies in the dirt at their feet.

Rachel and Susie Greene were thirteen years old, a year older than Sophia and Carl. If she hadn’t run into the woods a week ago, Sophia might’ve been dragged to the barn as a zombie and Carol wouldn’t’ve known her daughter was dead until this moment. Rachel wore glasses with thick plastic frames, like the ones she’s been wearing for almost a decade. It should be horrifying, but Lucy feels numb to the tragedy. There’s nothing she could’ve done for them, and dwelling on that would be a waste of time.

Beth extricates herself from Jimmy and runs to where the body of her mother fell. Whoever shot Annette Greene in the head didn’t aim for the brain—the bullet went in through her jaw and left a gaping hole in the gory apple of her cheek. Beth screams as her mother scratches at her, clawing gnarled fingers into her hair until Hershel snaps out of the shock he was in and drags her out of reach and she watches in horror as Cath stabs her zombified mother in the eye with one of her knitting needles. Hershel walks back through the field to the house with Maggie, Beth, and Patricia while Jimmy stays by the barn to put the bodies of his parents aside for burial. There are sixteen corpses rotting in the dirt, and ten of those people were loved ones; the other six are a funeral pyre waiting to happen. Carol and Sophia go and pick the Cherokee roses growing wild by where the creek runs through a field of weeds and thorns to make small bouquets while T-Dog finds sheets to shroud the bodies in and Andrea, Amy, Jacqui, and Morgan start digging graves in the shade of a grove of sugar maple trees at the edge of the dark forest.

“I want Shane off my land,” Hershel says before he flees into the comfort of his home and shuts the front door behind him. “I mean it—off my land.”

Glenn shoots Rick an apologetic look before he follows Maggie into the house with Gilda and Gert close behind him, just in case their brother needs backup.

Rick makes a futile attempt to shrug the tension out of his shoulders as he turns to face his best friend. “What the hell were you thinking?” he wants to know. “Hershel opened his home to us.”

“Hershel put us all in danger, man,” Shane retorts, “he kept a barn full of zombies.”

“So you just start an insurrection?” Rick shakes his head incredulously and struggles to suspend his disbelief, “hand out guns and massacre his family?”

“Hershel’s family is dead, Rick,” Shane points out.

“Well, he doesn’t believe that,” Rick shouts, “he thinks you just murdered them in cold blood!”

“I don’t care what he thinks!” Shane shouts back at him.

“I was handling it!” Rick snaps. “I was handling it, brother, I was handling it and you just—”

“Rick,” Shane cuts him off with a scowl and a scoff, “you’re just as delusional as that guy. Lucy had to use her damn blood as a commodity to buy safety for us ’cause you couldn’t handle it. So I took matters into my own hands and did what had to be done. I did what you couldn’t, Rick—” he clenches his jaw around the words and shoves his best friend out of his way, “—you don’t have to like it, but you know that’s the truth.”

After that, Shane goes to get Otis’ truck and transport the bodies to their gravesite while Rick turns to find a curious Lucy staring at him from behind her glasses. Daryl went to grab his crossbow from his tent and left her to her own devices in the meantime. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” she mumbles, “but I heard my name.”

Rick sighs. “What do you think about this?” he wants to know, “did Shane do the right thing?”

Lucy shrugs. “I showed Hershel the archival footage of Candace Jenner,” she informs him, “and he didn’t want to believe it when he saw it. Hershel wanted to believe in something in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and people with that kind of faith don’t listen to reason. I don’t think anything short of a rude awakening was going to change his mind. Hershel thought he was doing the right thing, but it ended up being the wrong thing…” she cocks her head owlishly before she adds, “… _errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum_.”

Rick frowns at her. “What?”

“It’s Latin,” Lucy explains, “most commonly translated as ‘to err is human, but to persist is diabolical.’ It means that we all make mistakes, but choosing to make the same mistakes again even after we’ve been shown the error of our ways is evil. I wouldn’t condemn Shane or Hershel until they deal with the consequences of their actions. What we do in the aftermath of trauma and tragedy shows who we truly are,” she clarifies and smiles in a way that innocuously doesn’t show her teeth, “all you have to do is wait and see.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_Old Georgia SR-16 Westbound._

* * *

Hershel puts on a suit to bury his wife and watch his loved ones return to dust. After the funeral is held in silence that looms in the humid air like a quiet riot, Beth slips into a state of shock and Hershel goes missing. There’s a flask that belonged to his father—who used to beat him and his brother—on top of the dresser in the room he shared with his wife. Since he didn’t allow liquor in the house, Maggie deduces that her father went to the bar in Sharpsburg where he used to spend his nights drinking before she was born.

Rick stops by his tent to reload his Colt before he waits by the buttermilk yellow jeep for Nico, Glenn, and Gilda. Nico calls shotgun and climbs into the passenger seat while Maggie leans in close to Glenn and whispers something that makes him gulp, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Gilda side-eyes her twin as Rick glances at them in the rearview mirror and backs up until they’re on the road.

“Maggie said she loves me,” Glenn blurts out as soon as they drive onto the highway, “but she doesn’t mean it. I mean, she can’t, I mean, she’s upset or confused, and she’s probably feeling like—”

“I think Maggie is smart enough to know what she’s feeling,” Rick points out.

“No,” Glenn says and shakes his head. “No, you know what? Maggie wants to be in love because she needs something, or someone, to hold onto.”

Nico rolls her eyes at him in the rearview mirror. “Glenn,” she says, “it’s obvious to everyone that Maggie loves you, and not just because you’re one of the last men standing.”

“We barely know each other,” Glenn stutters and stumbles over the words. “What does she really know about me? Nothing. We’re practically strangers, even though it feels like I’ve known her forever.”

“Okay,” Gilda says laconically, “if that’s how you feel, then what’s the problem?”

“I didn’t say it back,” Glenn mumbles. “I just stood there like a jerk.”

“Hey,” Rick says, “this is a good thing, something we don’t get enough of these days, so enjoy it, and when we get back, return the favor.”

“Yeah,” Nico adds, “it’s not like she’s going anywhere.”

Rick stops the jeep in the street next to a building hewn out of weathered old brick. Nico flicks her gaze up and down the block to check for signs of life or the undead, but it’s a ghost town.

Glenn eyes the former sheriff in the rearview mirror. “Rick?” he says hesitantly, “I knew about Lori, about her being pregnant.”

“I figured,” Rick whispers before he gets out of the driver’s seat and shuts the door behind him as quietly as the hunk of heavy metal allows. Lori never would have been able to talk Glenn into taking her on a supply run if she hadn’t told him why she wanted those abortifacient pills, and why she wanted to get them herself.

“I’m sorry I kept it from you,” Glenn whispers back.

 _To err is human_ , Rick thinks. “Don’t be,” he says out loud, “you did what you thought was right. Just so happens it wasn’t.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Daryl stands at the door to Lucy’s trailer and knocks as his heart constricts deep in his chest. _What the hell ’m I gettin’ so nervous for?_ he thinks. _I had my face between her legs a few hours ago. I should be able to have a fuckin’ conversation with her, for cryin’ out loud_.

When she opens the door and smiles at him, Daryl swallows hard because his throat goes dry at the sight of her. Lucy is wearing a new dress, a black and green one that doesn’t have blood staining the fabric. It’s unbuttoned enough that he can see the camisole underneath and he has to fight the urge to push her back inside her trailer and pull her dress up over her head; to spend the rest of the afternoon touching and tasting every inch of her soft, freckled skin. Lucy blushes at the ravenous look in his eyes and shuffles down the steps of her trailer. Daryl puts one hand on the small of her back, the heel of his palm a gentle pressure at the base of her spine. When he rubs his thumb in a slow circle over the curve of her back where her lumbar region arches, her knees actually buckle and she has to put more of her weight on her cane to stay on her feet as the pads of his fingers dig into her flesh hard enough to bruise.

Daryl clears his throat as she exhales a soft noise that makes his dick twitch. “I lost my arrows the other day,” he tells her, “all but one of ’em. I gotta make new ones.”

Lucy narrows her eyes at him behind her glasses and puts the coil of arousal below her belly on the backburner. “I’m guessing that means you want to look for sticks and feathers in the forest,” she deduces.

Daryl nods. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Wanna come with me? We could bring lunch,” he adds, “have a picnic.”

“What,” Lucy says, “like a date?”

Daryl nods again, short but sweet. “Yeah,” he says, “somethin’ like that.”

Going out hunting for fletchery supplies might not seem romantic to some people, but those people aren’t dating Daryl Dixon. If she knows him at all, this is his distinct way of showing her that he’s trying not to act like a lone wolf anymore—and that he would rather be alone with her than all by himself.

If that shit isn’t romantic, Lucy doesn’t know what is.


	17. Vital Signs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xEJusROWN4) is another video you should watch if you want to know about the decomposition rate of zombies on the show. I don’t think all of the math is correct, but it’s still interesting.

**You’ve always been a thinker. Keep your notebook and pencil:**  
**someone will have to record a history of plagues and patient zeroes.**

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Field Guide to the End of the World”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 17**  
Vital Signs

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Sharpsburg, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

After they eat their sandwiches and chips at the foot of a mulberry tree, Lucy and Daryl fill the basket they brought lunch in with the ripe berries and start filling canvas tote bags with sticks and feathers for fletchery. Daryl has a bunch of empty beer bottles back at the campsite and he plans on using the bases to make arrowheads because the kinds of brittle source rocks he would need to make arrowheads out of stone rather than glass can’t be found anywhere near the farm. Senoia is flatland, the kind of terrain devoid of chert and quartzite. On their way back, Daryl shoots a zombie that shambles into their path before it can make a meal of Romy and watches in confusion as Lucy pokes at the skin of its stomach with her cane. “What’re you doin’?” he asks.

“There are five stages of decomposition,” Lucy informs him in the phlegmatic voice she uses whenever she wants to explain something without infodumping at the speed of light, “the first is the fresh stage. Initial decay. Pallor mortis turns the skin ashen because your blood ceases to circulate through your capillaries. Algor mortis changes the temperature of the body to match the ambient temperature. Rigor mortis changes the composition of the muscles and they start to calcify on a cellular level. Livor mortis sets in and blood that isn’t circulating drains to the lower portions of the body. All of that occurs within twenty-four hours post mortem in cadavers exposed to the elements, but obviously zombies are decomposing at a decelerated rate. While they do have a heartbeat, their circulatory systems aren’t firing on all cylinders. After a few weeks of undeath, their hearts don’t pump blood to anywhere but their brains and and lungs and their hearts aren’t beating fast enough for them to avoid decomposing forever. All of the zombies we’ve seen have been in the first stage of decomposition, but this one isn’t. Look,” she pokes its stomach again, “its belly is distended.”

Daryl narrows his eyes at the bloated corpse for a few seconds before he turns back to her. “What’s that mean?” he wants to know.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and eyeballs a cluster of maggots festering in a laceration on its forearm, probably the scratch that killed this person and turned him into a zombie. These maggots haven’t molted yet, so they must’ve hatched that morning. “Gases accumulate in the body during the second stage of decomposition,” she explains, “putrefaction. Otherwise known as the bloat stage. After putrefaction comes the third stage, black putrefaction. Otherwise known as active decay. When the body reaches that state, liquefaction occurs and organs melt.”

Daryl watches her extract her listography notebook and write something down before she tucks it back in the pocket of her skirt. “You’re sayin’ their brains are gonna melt,” he deduces. “Ya’ just don’t know when.”

“It could take months,” Lucy clarifies as Romy sniffs the corpse and wibbles softly, “or even years, but…the dead are going to stop walking eventually. All we have to do is survive until then.”

Daryl squints at her. It blows him away, how smart she is; the way that brilliant mind of hers works. While everyone around them has been struggling with adapting to life in the zombie apocalypse, Lucy has been looking at the living dead and trying to figure out when their expiration date is. _That’s my girl_ , he thinks, _always thinkin’ ahead_.

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Sharpsburg, GA;_  
_The Carriage Bar._

* * *

It’s dusk by the time Gilda and Nico sneak around to the backdoor of the bar while Rick and Glenn walk in through the front entrance. Nico stabs a lone shambling zombie in the face and twists her knife through its eye socket with a flick of her wrist before she wipes the blood on its shirt instead of her jeans and shuts the backdoor as quietly as she can on her way inside.

“Hershel,” Rick says and the man who’s doing his damnedest to crawl into a bottle of whiskey flinches at the sound of his name.

“Who’s with you?” Hershel wants to know.

“Nico, Glenn, and Gilda,” Rick tells him.

“Maggie send you?” Hershel asks, posing the question more to Glenn than either of the girls.

“We volunteered,” Nico retorts. “We’re good like that.”

“How many have you had?” Rick wants to know.

“Not enough,” Hershel tells him.

Rick walks over to lean on the bar and eyes the half-empty bottle of whiskey before he opens his mouth. “Let’s finish this up back at home,” he whispers. “Beth’s in a state of shock. I think you are too.”

“Maggie’s with her?” Hershel asks.

“Yeah,” Glenn answers, “but they both need you.”

“What could I do?” Hershel shakes his head slowly. “Beth needs her mother, or rather to mourn her like she should’ve done weeks ago. I robbed her of that. I see that now.”

“You thought there was a cure,” Rick says, “and there is. Just not for the people that are too far gone. You can’t blame yourself for holding out for hope.”

“When I first saw you running across my field with your boy in your arms, I had little hope he would survive,” Hershel murmurs, “but he did. We saved your boy, and that was the miracle that proved to me that miracles do exist. Only it was a sham, a bait and switch. I was a fool, Rick, your people saw that…” he stops to take another swig of his drink, “…my daughters deserve better than that.”

“Okay,” Gilda whispers to Glenn, “so what do we do now? Just stand around waiting for him to pass out?”

“Just go!” Hershel screams at them. “Just go!”

“No,” Glenn says and swallows around the lump in his throat. “I promised Maggie I’d bring you home safe.”

“What’s your plan?” Rick asks, echoing Lucy unintentionally. “Finish that bottle? Or are you planning to drink yourself to death and leave your girls alone?”

“Stop telling me how to care for my family, my farm!” Hershel rises to his feet and stomps over to where Rick is standing, “you people are like a plague! I do the Christian thing—give you shelter—and you destroy it all! I didn’t want to believe you. Lucy tried to tell me these people were dead, not sick. I chose not to believe that, but when Shane shot Lou in the chest and she just kept coming…that’s when I knew what an ass I’d been, that Annette had been dead long ago, and I was feeding a rotting corpse!”

“Look, I’m not doing this anymore. I’m done cleaning up after you.” Rick shakes his head. “You know what the truth is? _Nothing has changed_ ,” he says and gnashes his teeth around the words, “death is death. It’s always been there, whether you die from a heart attack, or cancer, or a zombie. What’s the difference? You didn’t think it was hopeless before, did you? Hershel, there are people back at home trying to hang on, and those people need a reason to go on. This isn’t about what we believe anymore. It’s about them.”

Hershel takes another drink before the door swings open, the hinges creaking ominously.

“Son of a bitch,” the strange man silhouetted in the doorway says as they all turn to face him, “they’re alive.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Sharpsburg, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

When she hobbles back to the campsite with her cane in one hand and a basket of mulberries in the crook of the opposite elbow, Lucy finds Maggie sitting on the steps of her trailer. “I need to talk to you,” the farmer’s daughter tells her tersely.

Lucy shoos Maggie off to the side before she opens the door of her trailer. “Why?” she asks as she puts the basket of mulberries inside. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Beth,” Maggie says, “she’s infected.”

“How?” Daryl wants to know.

“I don’t know,” Maggie tells him, “she wasn’t bitten or scratched.”

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “You sure?” he asks gruffly.

Maggie nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “Positive.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and turns to look at Lucy. “How’s that possible?” he wants to know.

“I’ve got a theory,” Lucy murmurs, “but I’m going to need a blood sample to prove it.”

“Amy took one for you,” Maggie tells her, “she just didn’t want to risk opening your door without you or Nico around. Apparently it’s boobytrapped.”

“Okay,” Lucy says. “Let me get my microscope.”

Daryl snorts at the memory of Merle trying to break into the trailer and shitting himself. It’s hard to believe that was only two months ago, because so much shit has happened to him since then. Merle wouldn’t believe his eyes if he walked out of those woods today and saw how different things are.

Lucy shuffles out of her trailer with her microscope in its bag and smiles at Daryl with a rueful twist of her mouth. “Why don’t you sleep with me tonight?” she asks him. “Not in a sexy way, since you’re injured. I just missed you last night, too.”

Daryl nods so fast he almost hurts himself. “Sure,” he says. “Want me t’ come up t’ the house with ya’?”

Lucy shrugs. “Only if you’re up for some mad science,” she deadpans.

Daryl puts the tote bags full of fletchery supplies by her doorway and props his crossbow against her doorstep. _Never a dull moment_ , he thinks and takes Romy’s leash from her on their way up from the campsite to the farmhouse.

Beth’s room is on the second floor; her bedding is all white, the curtains are white eyelet lace, and most of the furniture is antique. It’s doubtful that she decorated the room herself, since the house has been in her family for almost two hundred years. There are black and white photographs on the walls of her mother as a child, of her great-grandmother and namesake Elizabeth. Jimmy is sitting in a chair by her bedside with a hollow look in his eyes. Lori is hovering in the hall. Andrea is standing off to one side of the doorway with her arms folded tight across her chest. Cath and Kate are in the kitchen, cooking dinner with Jacqui, Duane, Morgan, and Gert.

“Pulse is tachycardic,” Amy says as Lucy shuffles into the room. “Temp is a hundred and three and rising.”

“Where’s the other unit of blood that I gave to Hershel?” Lucy wants to know.

“Downstairs in the fridge,” Patricia tells her. “I’ll go get it.”

Lucy plugs her microscope into an outlet that has a working lamp connected to the other socket and puts it down on top of the desk by one of the open windows. Amy hands her a tiny test tube of blood. Lucy extracts a micropipette from her purse and puts a drop of blood on a clean glass slide.

“Why do you need a blood sample?” Maggie asks before she gets a chance to look through her microscope.

“There are two known strains of the zombie virus,” Lucy informs her. “HZV-A, the waterborne strain that was first identified by a virologist named Dr. Candace Jenner about six months ago, and HZV-B, the airborne strain that caused the global outbreak and the end of the world as we know it. HZV-A can manifest in one of two ways: as a latent virus that fuses with you on a cellular level with the water you drink and fluid exchanges like sex as primary and secondary vectors, or a live state infection with biting or scratching as the primary vector. HZV-B causes spontaneous viral amplification because its primary vector is airborne transmission, and it’s ninety-nine-point-nine-repetend percent lethal to those infected since as far as I know the only person to survive being infected with HZV-B is me. Dr. Edwin Jenner, whom we met at the C. D. C. a week ago, found antibodies with paratopes that indicated I had fought off both strains of the virus in my system. I got sick while my friends and I were at Disneyworld. I just thought I had the flu or something because I came down with viral infections at least once a month when I was still on immunosuppressants. I need a blood sample to see what strain of the virus Beth is infected with. I’ve only cured people infected with live state HZV-A so far. I don’t know if a transfusion of my blood is going to cure HZV-B. I’ve never had a chance to test it…” she trails off as she looks through her microscope at the blood on the slide before she blurts out, “…crap.”

“What?” Maggie asks urgently. “What’s wrong?”

Lucy flashes a grin at her over her shoulder. “Beth is immune to HZV-A,” she says. “There’s no waterborne pathogen in her system. I’ve taken samples from all of your wells, so I know it’s not because the virus didn’t get into the water supply here. I need blood samples from you, and Hershel too. Maybe the partial immunity Beth has is genetic.”

Daryl frowns. “How come she ain’t immune to the other strain of the virus?” he asks.

Lucy flashes a wider grin at him. “I have a theory that exposure to the waterborne pathogen gives the people infected with latent HZV-A partial immunity to HZV-B,” she explains, “and that would mean people who don’t have HZV-A in their systems are more vulnerable to the airborne HZV-B pathogen. It’s possible that Beth will be able to fight off the infection on her own—”

“We’re not taking that chance,” Maggie cuts in sharply. “Give her your blood. Now.”

Lucy holds up her hands in mock surrender. “Go ahead,” she tells Patricia, “better safe than sorry.”

What she doesn’t say is that if her theory is correct, this is the reason the outbreak of HZV-B went global and killed billions of people. Apparently the only way to explain why everyone left alive is infected with the latent HZV-A virus is because if they weren’t, they would be among the living dead.

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Sharpsburg, GA;_  
_The Carriage Bar._

* * *

After the daylight burns out and twilight looms on the horizon, Lori enlists Morgan to drive into town with her to bring Rick and the others back. Lucy checks in with Nico over the radio, but no one answers—instead she overhears a strange man talking on their frequency.

“We don’t know anything about you,” Rick says, his voice muffled and faraway.

“No,” says the stranger. “That’s true. You don’t know anything about us. You don’t know what we’ve had to go through out there, the things we’ve had to do. I bet you’ve had to do some of those same things yourself, am I right? Ain’t nobody’s hands clean in what’s left of this world,” his tone goes dark before he adds, “we’re all the same, so c’mon. Let’s take a nice friendly hayride to this farm and we’ll get to know each other.”

“That’s not gonna happen,” Rick says gravely.

“This is bullshit!” another man whose harsh voice she doesn’t recognize shouts.

“Hey,” Rick snaps at him, “just calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!” he yells and Lucy flinches out of habit because men yelling anywhere near her is never a good thing. “Don’t ever tell me to calm down! I’ll shoot you assholes in the head and take your fucking farm!”

“Relax,” says the stranger, “take it easy. Nobody’s shooting anybody. Look, we’re just friends having a drink. That’s—”

Only he doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence, because Gilda—who hid behind the bar when she recognized the voices of two men who almost gangraped her and her sister—shoots him in the face. Rick draws on the other man and puts three rounds in his chest before he has a chance to avenge his friend.

Lori walks into the bar with Morgan covering her back and gapes at the carnage. “What the hell did we miss?” she asks.


	18. Fly by Night

**Some things don’t pass, the injuries don’t heal**  
**they merely find a place in our guts and in our bones**  
**where they fitfully rest, tossing and turning**  
**between our knuckles and ribs**  
**waiting to wake as the shadows grow long.**

Toby Barlow, _Sharp Teeth_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 18**  
Fly by Night

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Lucy shuffles downstairs to the kitchen and sits on the counter next to where Cath is making a bowlful of carbonara sauce without the pancetta. There’s a roast in the oven, so her best friend must be making spaghetti for her as a vegetarian option because she can’t process the enzymes in meat without vomiting. Which is why Lucy would make a terrible zombie: she can’t even digest chicken, so human flesh is unequivocally off the menu. “I was right,” she murmurs, “the latent HZV-A infection makes people less vulnerable to HZV-B. What I didn’t know until today was that latent HZV-A is the reason everyone here except me and Rick is still alive.”

Cath arches her eyebrows as high as humanly possible, but on her that countenance looks cartoonish because of how expressive her face is. “So does that mean you can’t try to cure the latent virus?” she asks.

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “I won’t be able to cure the latent infection until I can make a vaccine that inoculates against both strains of the disease,” she answers with a petulant huff, “and I have no way of knowing how much the latent virus will alter your cognition and your behavior in the meantime.”

Cath snorts. “I know how much you hate not knowing things,” she teases.

Lucy rolls her eyes at that even though Cath isn’t wrong; she does hate not having all of the information she needs to feel in control of any given situation, especially since she knows she never is. Unfortunately, knowing that everything is out of her control doesn’t make her feel any better. If anything, not being in control just makes her anxiety worse.

Powerlessness is never easy to swallow. It’s like pride that way.

“Something’s wrong,” T-Dog says as Patricia cuts the roast and starts putting small portions onto plates, “they should be back by now.”

“I bet they’re just holed up somewhere,” Shane mutters, “we’ll head out to look for ’em first thing in the morning.” At that, he tosses some of the salad in the bowl in front of him onto his plate and slants his gaze to Carl. “I want you to keep your head up,” he says. “Okay?”

Carol goes to stand at the foot of the staircase. “Lori,” she calls up, “dinner.”

“Lori’s not upstairs,” Maggie tells her.

“Where is she?” Dale wants to know.

Shane frowns. “Carl,” he says. “When’s the last time you saw your mom?”       

Carl stops cutting his roast at the sound of his name. “This afternoon,” he says.

“What about you, Duane?” Jacqui asks. “Where’s Morgan?”

“I don’t know,” Duane says and his voice cracks on the _oh_ sound with a tremor of worry.

Lucy extracts her earpiece from the pocket of her skirt and tries to check in with Nico over the radio, only to hear two strange men talking to Rick followed by gunshots and Lori asking _What the hell did I miss?_ “Lori and Morgan went to Sharpsburg,” she informs the table in a loud voice that slices through the fragmented conversations they had been having amongst themselves, “they’re with Nico and the others at the bar. Shots were fired, but our people weren’t hurt.”

Daryl swallows a mouthful of roast he shoved into his mouth with his fingers and flicks his gaze to her. “Shit,” he drawls.

Shane exhales an appreciative noise through the gaps between his teeth. It’s not quite a whistle, more of a quiet whoosh of sound. “We’ve gotta get ourselves more of those radios,” he says. “Nobody in our group should be walking around without one.”

“What we need is a handheld ARDF system,” Kate says, “a device that can pinpoint where a radio signal is coming from. We would’ve found Lucy a hell of a lot faster with one of those.”

“Both,” Lucy deadpans. “Both is good.”

Shane is out of his chair and stomping outside into the darkness before he knows it; he and T-Dog check the barn while Andrea and Jacqui check the generator shed by the chicken coop. When their search comes up empty, they meet back at the campsite. Shane narrows his eyes at the old man in the eerily low light of the lantern in his hand. “Dale,” he says in a soft voice that sounds like a barely contained threat, “did you know about this?”

Dale shakes his head. “No,” he says.

Shane huffs. “Okay,” he says in a voice that oozes skepticism, “did she take a gun?”

“I don’t know,” Dale says, “but I wouldn’t have let her go out there unarmed.”

Shane glares at him before he extracts the keys to Otis’ truck from the pocket of his pants and opens the door, but he doesn’t climb into the passenger seat because he catches sight of Lucy clambering into the back of the truck in his periphery. “What the hell’re you doing?” he asks.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “I’m going with you,” she informs him. _Obviously_ goes unspoken, not unheard.

Shane might’ve protested before he got his ass kicked by her that morning, but he learned the hard way that she’s smart as hell and she’s a brawler who goes for your throat instead of fucking around. If she hadn’t wanted him to get back up after she took him down, he wouldn’t have. Lucy can handle herself; it’s Lori he’s worried about, even though on some level he knows she isn’t some damsel in distress either. Shane turns to look back over his shoulder at the archer, who went to grab his crossbow along with three arrows he whittled before they sat down to eat. “Guess that means you’re coming with us,” he says.

Daryl nods. “You bet your ass,” he says.

Shane folds himself into the driver’s seat and buckles his seatbelt. Cath slips in through the door on the passenger’s side before he has a chance to turn the keys in the ignition. “I’m coming too,” she tells him with a disarming smile.

“I’ll hold down the fort here,” Kate says over the radio so only Lucy, Cath, and Nico can hear her, “call for more backup if and when things go horribly wrong.”

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Sharpsburg, GA;_  
_The Carriage Bar._

* * *

There’s someone with a gun on the roof who shoots at them as Shane grinds to a halt on the dark roadway. Lucy squawks as one of the bullets hits the truck and sparks of friction glint dangerously close to the naked skin of her legs in between her socks and the hem of the shorts under her dress.

 _Oh_ , she thinks as she climbs on top of the truck without her cane and winces at the pain in her ankle before she draws both of her revolvers in one quick motion, _hell no_.

Then she fires and hits her target so the bullet whizzes in between the legs of the shooter. “I didn’t miss!” she informs him, “that was a warning shot! Now,” she slips her finger onto the triggers of her revolvers as Daryl slings his crossbow over his shoulder and pumps his shotgun, “put the gun down or the next one goes in your kneecap!”

“Unless the next one goes in his head!” Daryl shouts loudly enough for the man on the roof to hear.

Later, she and Daryl will agree that shooting the man on the roof would’ve made things a hell of a lot easier in the weeks to come. Unfortunately, they don’t know how this gunfight is going to end. Yet.

It ends about thirty seconds later with the shooter trying to jump down onto a dumpster betwixt and between two buildings, skewering one of his legs on the fence at the mouth of the alleyway where the dumpster lurks in the shadows, and screaming while his getaway driver puts his foot on the gas and speeds away without him…only to crash into the buttermilk yellow jeep parked in the middle of the street. Nico, Glenn, and Gilda run to the truck. Morgan, Shane, Rick, and Lori follow Hershel into the dark alley to see what became of the shooter. Lucy clambers back down into the flat bed of the truck and lets Daryl lift her with his hands on her thick waist until her feet touch the ground.

Gilda flicks her gaze to the getaway driver and turns to look at Lucy, her brown eyes gone wide and fearful.

Lucy shuffles over and eyes the discombobulated man in the wrecked car. “Nate?” she asks in a soft, deadly voice.

Gilda nods, and Lucy shoots the getaway driver in the neck. No moment of panic. No hesitation. No fear.

Lucy knows a gut shot would be more traumatic, but people who have been shot in the gut can still move and people with a gunshot wound in their throats typically can’t. There’s a reason she chose a .38 Special, and it wasn’t because she likes the way her revolvers look—it’s because a .38 Special round will blow your fucking face off. When she puts a bullet of that caliber in someone, she knows they’re not going to walk away from it. Lucy is too crippled to fight any other way than all or nothing, and losing is never an option.

Nico doesn’t bother to wait for Lucy to holster her revolvers before she grabs her best friend and wraps her in a hug so tight she exhales a soft _oof_. Rick, who came to investigate the gunfire, is horrified by the murder scene in front of him. “You shot a man in the throat,” he says. “Why?”

Lucy glances at Gilda because the reason she killed a man for the first time isn’t her secret to tell. Daryl is staring at her with the same intense gaze as always, but Lucy can’t bring herself to look at him because she knows that killing is supposed to make her feel something besides safer with one less rapist in the world and he might not look at her the way he does now that he’s seen how capable of violence she is under the right circumstances.

Gilda points to the yellowed week-old bruise on her cheek with one long, elegant finger even though it’s barely visible in the moonlight. “Lucy killed him because he made me suck his cock and hit me when I tried to bite it off,” she tells him flatly. “Gert got ahold of his gun while he was distracted and that’s how we escaped from the men who threatened to gangrape us. Why do you think I killed Dave?” she spits his name out like it’s a piece of gristle that got caught in between her teeth, “because he was a monster, and we kill monsters.”

Lucy ducks her head in a nod as she snaps her revolver into its holster and forces herself to look the former sheriff in the eyes. “I shot a monster, not a man,” she informs him, “my conscience is clear.”

Rick clenches his teeth around a frustrated noise as the sound of the man in the alley screaming again ricochets into the night—between the gunfire and the caterwauling, they’re going to get overrun by all of the zombies within earshot any minute now. There’s no time to have a philosophical debate about what makes a monster and what makes a man.

Hershel and Morgan are arguing over how to triage the injury sustained by the shooter. Morgan wants to apply a tourniquet and wait for blood flow to stop before they remove the injured leg from the fence and surgically repair it, but Hershel thinks amputating below the knee is the safest option. When he turns on his heels and walks back to where Lori and Shane are waiting in the shadows, Rick comes in like a dark horse and wins the argument Morgan and Hershel were having by grabbing the shooter and ripping his injured leg off the fence.

It’s time to get the hell out of dodge, and damn the consequences.

* * *

_Tuesday, 24 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 72._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_Old Georgia SR-16 Westbound._

* * *

After the shooter passes out from the pain in his shredded leg, Rick and Shane dump him in the trunk of the beige Mercury Sable that Lori borrowed from Maggie without asking. Hershel drives Glenn, Gilda, and Shane back to the farm in his red and gray Silverado while Cath, Nico, Lucy, and Daryl take the truck.

Daryl ends up sitting in the driver’s seat because none of the girls know how to work a stick-shift. Lucy slumps with her forehead against the passenger’s side window, her breath ghosting over the glass before the ephemeral condensation fades. Daryl glances at her sidelong and fights the urge to put a hand on her thigh because he needs to keep one hand on the gearshift and the other on the wheel. “You okay?” he asks.

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek before she answers. “You know I was raped.”

Daryl growls in the back of his throat because thinking about how anyone could do something so horrible to her pisses him off so much he sees red. “Yeah,” he mutters.

“I learned to shoot because I wanted to have an equalizer if I ever found myself in that position again,” Lucy tells him softly. “I know you shouldn’t draw a gun if you aren’t capable of putting a bullet in something, or someone. I almost ran my rapist over a few years ago when I saw him walking around my hometown, and the only reason I didn’t was because Cath stopped me.”

Cath makes a shrill humming noise in agreement. “I was in the car with her,” she adds, “and I only stopped her because she would’ve gone to jail for running him over in front of everyone in downtown Poulsbo and he wasn’t worth it.”

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress. “I believe that by killing him I would’ve been doing the world a favor,” she clarifies. “I don’t feel bad about what I did tonight. Maybe I’m in shock, but I doubt it. I feel safer knowing that nobody got away to tell a group of rapists where to start looking for us.”

Daryl pushes in the clutch and downshifts into second gear before he puts his foot on the brake, cups her face in one hand, and holds her gaze while he gently strokes her cheek with the rough pad of his calloused thumb. “Hey,” he murmurs, “I ain’t gonna stop lovin’ you ’cause you shot a rapist in the neck, you hear me?”

Lucy exhales a breath that she didn’t know she was holding and nuzzles his palm as she nods. “I love you, too.”


	19. Neurotica

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : I should warn you this chapter is 75% smut, so those of you who are underage or a friend of mine in the real world are reading past the opening scene at your own risk. Beware.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Neck Kissing, Oral Sex, Blow Jobs, Foreskin Play, Come Swallowing, Come Marking, Biting, Foreplay, Breastplay, Nipple Play, Nipple Licking, Fingerfucking, Vaginal Fingering, Dirty Talk, Multiple Orgasms.

**I have been struggling to find my safe place and sufficiently trust it. I have been struggling very hard.**

Anne Sexton, _A Self-Portrait in Letters_

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 19**  
Neurotica

* * *

_Wednesday, 25 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 73._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

It takes all night for them to drive back to the farm because straggling clusters of shambling zombies keep shuffling onto the road and blocking their way home and wasting their bullets on them is not an option, not if they don’t want anyone else who might be staying alive in the shadows to figure out where they are—and where they’re going. Which is why they end up having to haul a bunch of dead bodies in the back of the truck to bury as soon as the sun comes up. It’s not safe to burn corpses when a group of rapists might be camped out somewhere close enough to see the plumes of smoke from the pyre floating into the sky; but they can’t leave a trail of dead bodies that leads back to the farm, either.

Carl, who overheard the so-called adults talking about his mother and her pregnancy, runs out of the house as soon as the cars pull onto the patch of dirt and dead grass that passes for a driveway. “Mom!” he shouts as Rick crouches to give him a hug, “Dad! You’re okay!”

Maggie runs to hug Glenn, who lets her throw her arms around his neck in a daze from lack of sleep before he pushes her away. Gert flicks her gaze from her little brother to the farmer’s daughter and sighs. _Love hurts_ , she thinks. It’s about time he learned that lesson.

“Patricia,” Hershel says as his exhaustion creeps into his voice, “prepare the shed for surgery. Amy, would you mind assisting with the procedure?”

Amy nods. Hershel isn’t the kind of surgeon she thought she would be learning from, but she’s not going to pass up the opportunity to cut.

“Who the hell is that?” T-Dog asks as Rick goes to help Shane pull the unconscious shooter out of the trunk of Maggie’s car.

“Randall,” Glenn says, “that’s Randall.”

Amy, Hershel, and Patricia go perform surgery in the ramshackle shed while everyone else waits in the dining room to see if Randall is going to die on the table. Which is unlikely given the nature of his injury, but hope springs eternal.

“We couldn’t just leave him behind,” Rick says as Amy, Hershel, and Patricia enter the dining room and breaks the palpable silence that was hanging over them like a corpse from a tree, “he would’ve bled out, if he lived that long.”

Lucy muffles a yawn in the hollow of her palm before she glares at the former sheriff. “Which wasn’t our problem until you made it our problem,” she points out.

“What do we do with him?” Andrea wants to know.

“Amy and I repaired his calf muscle as best we could,” Hershel tells her, “but he’ll probably have nerve damage.”

“Randall won’t be on his feet for at least a week,” Amy adds.

“When he is,” Rick murmurs, “we give him a canteen, take him out to the main road, and send him on his way.”

“Okay,” Jacqui says, “but isn’t that the same as leaving him for the zombies?”

Rick shakes his head slowly. “No,” he says, “this way he’ll have a fighting chance.”

“We can’t just let him go,” Morgan says, “he knows where we are.”

“Randall was blindfolded the whole way here,” Rick snaps back, “he’s not a threat.”

Shane scoffs. “We killed three of their men and took one of ’em hostage,” he says, “but they just ain’t gonna come looking for him?”

“Nate left Randall for dead before Lucy shot him,” Rick snarls, “no one is looking.”

“We should still post a guard,” T-Dog suggests.

“There’s no need for that,” Hershel says, “he’s out cold right now, will be for hours.”

Shane sneers at him. “You know what?” he asks. “I’m gonna go and get him some flowers and candy.” When he walks around the dining room table to the door, he keeps his hand on the grip of his sidearm the whole way. “Look at this, folks!” he shouts at them all over his shoulder. “We’re back in fantasy land!”

“You know,” Hershel raises his voice and glares at Shane as the other man turns on his heels to face him, “we haven’t even dealt with the stunt you pulled at my barn yet. Let me make myself perfectly clear: this is my farm. I wanted you gone. Rick talked me out of it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it,” he stands his ground as Shane gets in his personal space and instead of backing down at the last minute like Dale would have he says, “so do us both a favor and keep your mouth shut.”

“Look,” Rick cuts in before Shane can escalate the situation any further. “We’re not gonna do anything about it today. Let’s just cool off.”

Shane flicks his gaze to Lori before he turns and walks out of the house. It’s been a long night, so the others scatter like seeds on the wind to occupy their idle hands with chores or get some long-awaited sleep.

Andrea catches up with Shane on his way back to his tent. “I can take first watch,” she offers.

Shane nods. “I’m gonna take the graveyard,” he mutters.

“Okay,” Kate says. “We keep watch over this guy, and then what? We just send him off into the wild blue yonder?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “According to Rick and Hershel.”

“If we let him go and he finds his people and leads them here, we’ll have a war on our hands,” Nico tells him even though she knows he was thinking the same thing.

“You’re preaching to the choir,” Shane murmurs. “These folks, they wanna play house and pretend that Rick and Hershel know what they’re doing. Let me tell you something: they’re bound to get us all killed.”

“We have to stop that from happening,” Amy says.

Shane shakes his head so fast he almost gives himself whiplash. “Nah,” he says bitterly, “they don’t listen. You watch, Rick and Hershel are gonna give him a care package and send him on his way, and that’s gonna bring on a war or something worse and we’re gonna sit here and wait for it. I should’ve left when I had the chance.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Lucy snaps at him. “I’ve been giving Rick the benefit of the doubt because he’s been in this situation for a week and a half and I thought he might need more time to adapt. If he lets Randall go because he thinks a group of rapists coming here is somehow an acceptable risk, then I’ll know I can’t trust him. I don’t want to lead,” she clarifies, “but I want to survive. If push comes to shove, this group is going to need someone like you,” she glances at Nico before she adds, “someone who isn’t going to cry over spilled blood.”

Shane nods curtly. “I’m with you,” he tells her. “Just say when.”

Famous last words.

* * *

Daryl goes to grab a change of clothes from his tent and takes a shower in the house before he lets himself into the trailer. There’s a trick with knowing how to avoid touching the modified joy buzzer that he figured out a while ago from watching the girls, but he didn’t want to invite himself into her space—he wanted her to want him to come in.

Lucy is sitting at her tiny corner table eating off a plate of buttered toast with cinnamon and sugar on top in front of her. Daryl lets the door swing shut behind him while she eats the last piece.

“Okay,” he says, “lemme see if I understand this: did ya’ or did ya’ not just ask Shane t’ kill Rick for ya’?”

Lucy sighs. “When I said the thing about spilling blood, I meant killing everyone in that group of rapists before they get anywhere near us,” she clarifies. “I don’t want Rick dead, but Shane has every reason to want him out of the way now that he knows Lori is pregnant. If someone doesn’t keep him in check, he’s going to fly off the handle and do something he’ll regret. I also don’t know whether or not I can trust Rick, and I’m not going to burn any bridges with either him or Shane before their petty drama runs its course and I see who the last man standing is. I hope it’s both of them, but I have to plan for every possible contingency and it’s not only possible but probable that one of them is going to try to kill the other.”

Daryl nods. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Y’ain’t wrong.”

Lucy bites her lip and forces herself to look him in the eyes. “You knew I was traumatized before we fell in love,” she says, “this is what I do. I catastrophize and I try to manipulate things to make myself feel safer. I’m not going to apologize for that.”

“I wasn’t askin’ you to,” Daryl says gruffly. “I just wanted t’ know what ya’ were thinkin’. I can’t read your mind, y’know.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “I’m scared, Daryl,” she whispers. “I’m scared of Randall bringing a group of rapists to our door. I’m scared because our leader is a white policeman, and white policemen have a long history of not listening to women who talk about rape. I’m scared that Shane, Rick, and Lori are going to ruin the safest haven we’ve found so far with their petty drama. I’m scared that killing Nate wasn’t enough to keep us safe.”

Daryl swallows hard. Lucy doesn’t show her fear to anyone, even though she isn’t shy about her anxiety or the more rational fear of the undead lurking around every corner of the world. Daryl has never seen her act afraid of anything, but now he can see the fear in the whites of her eyes and hear it seeping into the cadence of her voice. “I’ll kill Randall for ya’,” he says.

Lucy blinks at him behind her glasses. “What?”

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “I’ll go and slit his throat right now if that’ll make you feel better,” he tells her quietly, seriously.

Lucy narrows her eyes at him. “You would do that for me?” she asks in a raw whisper.

Daryl nods again. “There ain’t nothin’ I wouldn’t do for ya’,” he says, “ya’ oughta know that much by now.”

Lucy shuffles over until she’s flush against him from hip to chest and puts one hand on his shoulder for balance as she goes on tiptoe to look him dead in the eyes. Daryl swallows hard as she cups his face in her other hand and shuts his eyes as she slants her soft mouth over his, sucking on his upper lip before she does the same to the lower. Lucy kisses him hard and tantalizingly slow, applying the perfect amount of pressure to make him growl low in his throat while he fists one hand in her hair and helps himself to a handful of her plump ass with the other.

It’s been months since he fucked anything but his own hand, so just being kissed by her and feeling the heat of her soft body pressed up against him is enough to get him so hard that his zipper bites into the underside of his dick. When she kisses along his jaw and nibbles on his earlobe before she licks and sucks on the divot behind his ear, Daryl almost comes in his pants. It was nothing short of a damn miracle that he didn’t blow his load while he was eating her out in the stables.

“Shit,” Daryl hisses fervently. “Lucy, you’re killin’ me.”

“La petite mort,” Lucy whispers in his ear.

Daryl lets her walk him back until his knees bump against the edge of her mattress and he sits his ass down. Lucy stays on her feet and he tilts his head to look at her. “What’s that mean?” he wants to know.

“It’s French,” Lucy informs him before she pulls her dress up over her head and drops her shorts. “It literally translates as ‘the little death.’ It can mean the transcendent feeling a person gets from reading a really good book. It can also mean an orgasm. I’m going to kill you in the best possible way. Hand me a pillow.”

Daryl stares at her with his mouth gaping open as she unzips her boots and peels her socks off. Lucy is standing in front of him in her bra and panties, the shiny black satin and sheer lace a sharp contrast with her pale freckled skin. Daryl has to lick his lips because his mouth goes dry at the sight of her and his heart stutters deep in his chest. “What?” he asks hoarsely.

“I want to blow you,” Lucy clarifies. “Hand me a pillow to put under my knees.”

Daryl has to process that before he grabs one of her pillows and puts it down in front of her. After it occurs to him that she didn’t try to take his biker vest or his shirt off because she knows about his scars and Lucy would never want to make him uncomfortable, he unbuttons them himself and shrugs them off while she gets on her knees in between his thighs. “Lucy, you don’t have t’—” he says and his jaw clenches tight around the words as she palms his hardon through the thick material of his jeans and he chokes out a vehement, “— _fuck_.”

“I know I don’t have to,” Lucy tells him as she unbuckles his belt and ducks her head to unzip his jeans with her teeth, “I want to. If you don’t want to, don’t hesitate to stop me. I won’t hold it against you.”

Which is all well and good, but he doesn’t want her to stop. All he wants is her pretty mouth on him, now that he knows she wants it too. Daryl shoves his pants down around his ankles, the buckle on his belt a loud clank against the linoleum floor of her trailer; he only has the one pair of boxers, so these days he goes without underwear more often than not.

Lucy can’t help but stare at him while her mouth waters in anticipation. Daryl is hard, so hard the blunt head of him peeking out of his foreskin is flushed and gleaming with drops of his precum. Lucy did that to him, made him want her so much his cock is curving up toward his navel from where his balls hang tight and heavy between his legs. It’s a good feeling, one that she chased in junior high and she made a habit of sucking cock because she had the lowest of low self-esteem.

Daryl clears his throat awkwardly. “Ain’t gonna suck itself,” he mutters.

Lucy snorts and wraps her hand around him, gently swirling her thumb over the head of him while she flicks her tongue over the underside of his dick at the base and slowly works her way up the length of him to get him nice and wet before she finally licks at his foreskin with delicate swipes of her tongue and strokes him with one hand while she fondles his balls with the other.

Daryl clenches his fists in the fuzzy blanket on her bed and wheezes out a series of grunts at the effort it takes not to grab her by the hair and thrust up into her mouth hard enough to hit the back of her throat. What she’s doing with her lips and tongue feels so good it should be illegal. Lucy gently peels back his foreskin with her tongue and licks the dripping slit on the head of him before she wraps her lips around it and sucks. Daryl almost comes right there and he grits his teeth around a guttural whine as she pulls away, fixated on the string of her saliva that stretches between the red head of his cock and her pretty mouth before it breaks. “What the hell’re you stoppin’ for?” he rasps.

Lucy stops playing with his balls and pokes the edge of the bandage taped over the wound in his side. “You shouldn’t move your hips too much,” she tells him softly. “You’ll rip your stitches again.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and he knows his face is red, but he doesn’t care. “Fine,” he grits out, “just don’t stop.”

Lucy ducks her head to lick one of his balls with the flat of her tongue, sucking gently while she strokes his dick from base to head with hard and soft twists of her wrist. When he looks down, Daryl sees her looking up and that’s all it takes to make his balls tighten almost violently. Lucy finally licks at his foreskin again and sucks on the head of him until his eyes roll back in his head and he comes in her mouth. There’s so much she can’t swallow it all, and he doesn’t blow his load all at once so some of his spunk ends up spurting onto her chest. Lucy glances down at herself and squawks because he gets enough of a second wind to throw her down on her bed and crawls on top of her to lick his spunk up off where it splattered in between her breasts. Daryl unhooks her unstained bra with his deft fingers and yanks the straps over her arms while he stares at her bare tits with a ravenous look in those intense eyes of his: the blue of his irises dark with lust, his pupils blown wide.

Daryl cups her pretty breasts in his hands, his thumbs swirling and stroking her nipples before he pinches them between his thumbs and forefingers hard enough to make her whimper so loudly that she bites her lip in a futile attempt to muffle the sound, her back arching as her hips pitch up. Lucy squirms under him at the first slow flick of his tongue over her nipple, his breath hot on her skin before he sucks the hard nub into the heat of his mouth with an obscene wet sound, his beard and stubble rubbing against the sensitive flesh around her areola slick from his spit and her sweat.

When he gently bites her nipple, her whole body jerks with a shudder of pleasure that makes her toes tingle and curl so tight she feels the bones pop. Daryl glances up and holds her gaze while he moves his mouth to her other nipple and tugs it between his teeth. Lucy wraps her arms around his neck, her fingers clutching at his bedraggled hair. Daryl nuzzles the hollow between her breasts and licks the goosebumps rising on her skin, tasting the tang of her sweat and groaning low in the back of his throat at the intoxicating scent of her: black cherries on top of something fresh and sweet, like the pure air that comes from trees rooted in the deepest part of a forest.

Daryl kisses the hollow of her throat and licks up the side of her neck, the flat of his tongue soft in contrast to the ferocity of the nips he gives her with his teeth. Lucy moans softly as his calloused fingers slip down over the curves of her waist and belly to thumb at the edge of her panties. Daryl had been so desperate to taste her in the stables that he didn’t take the time to look at her in her underwear, but he had put his hand inside the fabric to feel how wet she was and he can tell the difference between the texture of silk and satin trimmed with smooth lace. Lucy in bed with him in nothing but a pair of skimpy black panties and blushing from her cheeks all the way down to her gorgeous tits is a sight he never thought he’d be lucky enough to see, the closest to heaven that he’s ever going to get. “These ain’t the ones ya’ had on before,” he observes.

Lucy blushes and tugs her bottom lip between her teeth. “I changed them because they got dirty,” she mumbles.

Daryl smirks at her as the muscles under the flab of her belly clench so hard he can feel her go taut as any bowstring under his palm. “These won’t get dirty if I take ’em off ya’,” he drawls.

Lucy shakes her head slowly. “It’s too late for that,” she says, “sucking your cock made me wet. I’ve never seen an uncircumcised penis in the flesh, or blown an uncut guy before.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and looks at her, his gaze hooded. Of course he can smell the sweet musky scent of her arousal, but he didn’t expect her to say it outright. Lucy is a bittersweet mix of brutal honesty and bone-deep insecurity, and he doesn’t always know which side of her is going to win. “So ya’ liked it?” he asks as she lifts her hips and he pulls her panties off before he drops them on the floor, “ya’ don’t think givin’ me head is gross or nothin’?”

Lucy shakes her head again. “I liked it,” she tells him shyly. “I wouldn’t have put your dick in my mouth if I was grossed out by it.”

Daryl puts one hand on the back of her neck and kisses her hard enough to make her gasp sweetly while he licks into her mouth and kisses her deeper. Lucy sucks on his tongue and spreads her legs, and he cups her bare pussy to grind the heel of his palm against her clit while he strokes one finger up from the bottom of her slit to swirl around her aching wet hole. Daryl groans and ducks his head to nuzzle the crook of her neck while he slips his finger into her slowly, his dick throbbing and trying to get hard again. Hell, he can feel how fucking tight she is with one finger and he wants to _take_ her, to bury himself deep inside the soft wet heat of her—but he knows he has to wait until the wound in his side heals, and that gives him the presence of mind to take it slow and make this good for her.

“I love you,” Daryl growls low and rough in her ear while he hunts down the sweet spot inside her that makes her pussy clench like a vice around his finger, “and part of me wants t’ take you on picnics and hold your hand ’cause you deserve all that romantic shit, but another part of me wants to fuckin’ _tear you apart_. I wanna fuck your pretty face. I want you lookin’ up at me while I jam my dick all the way down your throat. I wanna come all over you so you’ll smell like me, like you’re _mine_.”

Lucy whimpers at that and he gently bites the shell of her ear in between the barbells of her industrial piercing to punctuate the slow twist and grind of his finger in and out of her pussy.

“I want you down on all fours stickin’ your ass out and beggin’ me t’ take you from behind,” Daryl says and flicks his thumb back and forth over her clit while she drips all over his palm. “I wanna fuck your sweet little pussy _raw_.”

When she comes, he almost stops playing with her swollen clit until she tells him that she wants more. Daryl rubs her with his thumb so she comes again, and again, and again until she grabs his wrist and shoves his hand away from her pussy.

“Okay,” Lucy gasps and squeezes her thighs together as she breathes through the aftermath of multiple orgasms, “no more.”

Daryl stares at her while he licks up the slick that she got all over his hand. “What was that?” he wants to know. “I ain’t never seen anyone come so much.”

Lucy exhales a loud whoosh of air. “Serial orgasms,” she informs him. “It’s nice to know I can have them without using my vibrator. I’m not questioning your skills because you obviously know what you’re doing, but a sex toy can do things a person can’t. I didn’t know if I would be able to come that way for you, but I wanted to try.”

Daryl has to pick his jaw up off the floor at the thought of Lucy playing with herself until she figured out how to make her pussy come like that. _I’m a virgin_ , she had told him, _not a prude_. Apparently this is what she meant by that. _Shit_ , he thinks, _this girl really is gonna be the death of me in the best damn way_.

“What makes you think we can’t do all of the things you said?” Lucy asks as soon as she catches her breath, “the rough sex and the romantic shit.”

Daryl glances down the line of her body to see that her thighs are still trembling. “I don’t wanna hurt ya’,” he says gruffly.

Lucy makes a herculean effort to stop herself from rolling her eyes at him. Daryl isn’t much of a talker, so the only reason he brought up the rough sex was to ask for her permission in his own uncouth way. Lucy knows he won’t hurt her because he wanted her before he loved her and he didn’t just take what he wanted, like her rapist did. “Look,” she says, “I know I don’t have a lot of sexual experience, but I do know the difference between consensual kink and sexual violence. There’s nothing wrong with you wanting to have rough sex with me, not if you have my permission. I want to take it slow the first time you fuck me with your cock because I’m worried I might have a panic attack because of everything I’ve been through. After that, everything you said you want to do to me is totally on the table.”

Daryl clenches his teeth around a raw noise and sucks in a sharp breath as his heart constricts deep in his chest. “Seriously?” he asks.

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “I like teeth,” she points out. “I might like it rough, too. I won’t know until we try.”


	20. Sweet Miracle

**your hands like a bullet—**  
**my hands like a gun that holds**  
**the bullet.**  
**we are both made of the same danger,**  
**both made of realities we can’t**  
**run away from.**

Salma Deera, “Bullets”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. IV**  
_Miles Behind Us_  
**Chapter 20**  
Sweet Miracle

* * *

_Friday, 27 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 75._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Lucy spends two days plotting before she starts gearing up for war. After he shoots down her plan to let Randall go and follow him to where his group is camped out so they can drop a few of the live grenades from the crate she found at the C. D. C. on them and be done with it, Rick is officially at the top of her shit list. There are moments that she thinks about leaving the farm and finding someplace where she can set up a research lab, but she has never run from a fight in her life and she’s not about to start now that she isn’t physically capable of running anywhere without seriously painful repercussions.

After two days, the program she started coding at the quarry is finally done and that means they can go out looking for supplies using something more efficient than the yellow pages to see where things are. Lucy opens her laptop and runs the program from the dining room table with the others gathered around her, too close for comfort.

“What’s that?” Glenn wants to know.

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder. “Okay,” she says, “remember how I told you that I wanted as many portable hard drives as you could find?”

Glenn nods. After he looted an electronics store, he brought her a bunch of spare laptop chargers and half a dozen 2TB portable hard drives. “Yeah,” he says, “why?”

Lucy smiles as the program opens and fills the screen. “I saved the satellite images of the entire continent from Google Maps before the power grid failed and the internet crashed,” she informs him. “I had to create a new program in order to reconfigure the data for storage on a local server and circumvent the real-time search function that pulled results from the worldwide web that we can’t access because the world is mostly dead. You’re looking at the last digital rendering of a map in the highest possible resolution, complete with a geolocation system that gives directions and a way to narrow searches using a classification system I designed with categories and subcategories for different kinds of supplies we might need.”

“Wait,” Andrea says, “this is what you were doing at the quarry when we all thought you were sleeping?”

“I was sleeping,” Lucy informs her, “but this is what I was doing when I wasn’t taking a nap or crying because my ankle hurt so badly that I couldn’t move.”

“What did you say you did before the world went to hell in a handbasket?” Hershel asks.

“I didn’t,” Lucy says. “I’m a librarian. I specialized in archival studies and research librarianship,” she types _531 Chestlehurst Road, Senoia, GA 30276_ into the map and pinpoints the location of the farmhouse, “and making digital information more accessible is well within my very comprehensive skill set.”

Daryl squints at the screen as she runs a search for _grocer_ and _garden_ , both in parentheses and truncated by a small asterisk. “You made all this?” he asks.

Lucy hums her answer. “I took all of this data from preexisting sources and repurposed it so we wouldn’t be limited by the lack of wi-fi or GPS in the apocalypse if and when we needed to use it,” she clarifies. “I’m looking for grocery stores and gardening stores because we’re going shopping for reloading supplies today.”

“Where are we going?” Nico wants to know.

Lucy clicks on one of the search results and taps another button to generate a route from Senoia to Peachtree City. “Where none but dads have gone before,” she deadpans.

* * *

_Friday, 27 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 75._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_Home Depot._

* * *

Lucy thinks of summer as a season of projects, because her father was a developmental psychologist who worked out of public elementary schools and he didn’t have to work during the summer. Unfortunately her father was incapable of actually taking a vacation, so every year he would plan to work on a plethora of home improvement projects and only finish half of them because they always took longer than he expected. When she went to Home Depot with her parents as a teenager, she would go into the gardening section of the store with her mother and help her find the right fertilizer for each portion of their yard or follow her father into the grilling section to grab a bag of charcoal briquettes.

Which is how she knows exactly where to find everything a girl needs to make her own gunpowder.

Home Depot, like the mall, is a place that should not be empty. There are a few zombies in the parking lot that Daryl shoots one by one before he parks his bike in front of the semi-trailer truck they found on the highway for this mission—the rig has a Florida license plate and it was full of hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical supplies and equipment from Project C. U. R. E., a nonprofit relief organization. According to the manifest, the semi was bound for a refugee center in Atlanta; the refugee center that got overrun in the first month of the worldwide outbreak.

After they pry open the ineffectual automatic doors, Lucy stabs a zombie with her machete and wipes the congealed blood on its virulently orange apron. “There are three components in the recipe for black powder,” she explains as she hands out colorful post-it notes to Nico, Daryl, Maggie, Glenn, and Kate, “sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter. Home Depot has twenty-pound bags of sulfur because it can be used to lower the PH of alkaline soil and eighteen-pound bags of charcoal briquettes most commonly used for grilling. What’s tricky is the last ingredient, saltpeter. There are three ways to obtain saltpeter, otherwise known as potassium nitrate. One, by finding tree stump remover in any gardening store, because tree stump remover is often pure saltpeter. Two, by making it out of ammonium nitrate and potassium chloride. Three, by using your own piss and shit to make the compound, but that way takes months and it’s gross. If you can’t find tree stump remover, ammonium nitrate can be found in any gardening store because it’s most commonly used as fertilizer or extracted from cold packs in its crystallized form, and potassium chloride is just a fancy name for sodium-free salt.”

“Why are you telling us this when you have a bunch of tree stump remover you found in Fayetteville?” Glenn asks.

“Two reasons,” Lucy informs him. “One, because substituting ammonium nitrate for potassium nitrate in the recipe for black powder makes a more powerful explosive and potassium nitrate can also be used to make a smoke bomb by mixing saltpeter with sugar, so knowing how to make potassium nitrate diversifies our arsenal. Two, because we’re eventually going to run out of tree stump remover and it’s always good to have a contingency plan. There’s also no reason not to share what I know. I can’t be everywhere at once. These ingredients are things you should be able to find on supply runs, so I’m telling you what to look for when I’m not around.”

“Where’d you learn all that?” Maggie wants to know.

Lucy shrugs. “It’s amazing what a girl can learn with an internet connection and insatiable curiosity,” she deadpans. “I also have this.”

Maggie takes the copy of the _Anarchist Cookbook_ the librarian extracts from her backpack and flips to one of the recipes marked with a bright red plastic tab. It’s a list of recipes for black powder with notes written in Lucy’s inscrutable messy cursive: _13 grams for a .38 Special round, 10.2 grams for a .357 Magnum round, 7.5 grams for a 9mm round_. “What about shotgun rounds?” she asks.

“Those use smokeless powder,” Lucy informs her, “although most bullets do nowadays. It’s impossible to make because smokeless powder requires chemicals that cannot be handled safely in the wild, like nitroglycerine or nitrocellulose, or compounds that aren’t commonplace like diphenylamine. Worse, all of the modern recipes for smokeless powder invented in the forty years since the _Anarchist Cookbook_ was published were proprietary because the manufacture of automatic firearms was a multibillion dollar industry pre-apocalypse, so that information wasn’t easily accessible. I could tell you what chemicals go into making single-base, double-base, and triple-base formulations, but not how much of each was used. If someone finds me a gun factory with a generator and manufacturing equipment that works and a recipe, then I might try as long as I had access to regulation safety gear and a decontamination shower. Until then, let’s stick to black powder.”

“Why can’t we make shotgun rounds with black powder?” Glenn wants to know.

“I’m not saying we can’t,” Lucy clarifies, “but I don’t have a way to make slugs, buckshot, or birdshot. Unless you do, we can’t reload shotgun rounds.”

“I bet we can find slugs and shot at a gun shop,” Daryl says. “There’s one about half a mile from here.”

Lucy tries not to blush as the hand he isn’t using to carry his crossbow skims from the hollow between her shoulder blades along the curve of her spine, the heel of his palm a subtle pressure at the small of her back. Daryl has been touching her more and more since he started sleeping in her bed, but his touch is never intrusive; he’s not crowding her, he’s showing her that he meant it when he said he wasn’t going anywhere. “Nico,” she says, “go with Daryl to the gun shop. Glenn, you and Kate start hauling fertilizer. Maggie, you stay here with me so we can guard the rig.”

Glenn almost objects to splitting up with Maggie, but he knows Lucy split them up this way so everyone would be able to stay in contact over the radio frequency she and her friends use to keep track of each other, and that gives him an excuse to keep giving her the silent treatment and wallowing in the moment of weakness he had during the shootout two nights ago; so instead of arguing, he steals a glance at her before he looks away abruptly and goes to find a platform truck. Kate rolls her eyes behind his back and shrugs apologetically before she grabs a platform truck of her own and catches up with him.

Daryl slings his crossbow back over his shoulder, cups Lucy’s face in both of his calloused hands, and kisses her. It’s quick and glancing, but that doesn’t stop her toes from curling into the orthopedic insoles of her boots.

Nico snorts at her, the kind of mockery devoid of malice that friends throw around like confetti. Daryl ends up letting the engineer drive his motorcycle because she can’t sit behind him with his crossbow strapped to his back. Luckily she got her Class M driver’s license pre-apocalypse.

After the smooth thrum of the engine is out of earshot, Lucy scrumps an abundance of seed packets from a display by the doors and sits in the back of the semi with her feet dangling in the stale air above the ground.

Maggie goes to sit next to her, glancing at her sidelong. “Glenn trusts you,” she murmurs, “he listens to you.”

Lucy shrugs. “I saved his life twice in Atlanta,” she says, “and before that we bonded at the quarry because we both think J. R. R. Tolkien was racist and sexist but we still love the _Silmarillion_ and _Lord of the Rings_. It’s hard to love stories that don’t love you back.”

“Glenn told me that he froze during the shootout downtown,” Maggie tells her, “he blames me. Says I got inside his head.”

Lucy makes a noise that sounds like the bastard offspring of a garbage disposal and a rabid bear. “Glenn shouldn’t take his shit out on you,” she says, “but sometimes it’s hard to see through your own shit and look at how other people are feeling. Glenn has never been in a real romantic relationship before, as far as I know. I don’t think he knows he’s doing something wrong. If you want him to wise up and stop blaming you for how he feels, you need to tell him that he isn’t treating you right. If you don’t want to put up with it, then don’t. If you want to move forward with him, then you have to tell him how you feel and go from there.”

“I told him that I love him,” Maggie says. There’s no regret or uncertainty in her voice, only a wobble of disappointment that saying those three words out loud didn’t make things with Glenn go the way she hoped they would.

Lucy adjusts her glasses and forces herself to look the farmer’s daughter in the eyes. “I love Daryl,” she retorts, “but love isn’t enough to make a relationship work. Glenn will get over himself eventually. What matters is that you’re both alive to figure out how you want to move forward together.”

Maggie doesn’t get a chance to respond to that because Nico checks in with Lucy over the radio to inform her that Wahoo Firearms hasn’t been hit by scavengers like the places in Fayetteville and downtown Sharpsburg have. Which is chilling, because that means the people of this city were probably wiped out by the plague; but it’s also comforting to Lucy, because it means the group of rapists hasn’t been through here.

“Okay,” Lucy says, “we’ll meet you in about an hour. Sparklebutt, do you copy?”

“Yeah,” Kate says, “got it.”

Maggie turns to look at Lucy and arches her eyebrows as high as they can go. “Sparklebutt?” she asks.

Lucy shrugs again. “Kate can never find jeans that fit because she’s five-eleven,” she explains, “for a long time her only pair had rhinestones on the back pockets and they refracted in the sunlight.”

Maggie snickers. “Which made her butt sparkle,” she deduces.

Lucy ducks her head in a nod as the aforementioned tall girl with the sparkly ass pushes a platform truck loaded with sulfur and charcoal through the doors to where the rig is parked, waiting. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “we came up with codenames in case someone out there has the technology to listen in.”

Maggie has to make a conscious effort to stop giggling and moves out of the way so Glenn can haul the bags of charcoal briquettes into the back of the rig. “What’s yours?” she wants to know.

“Medusa,” Lucy informs her, “because everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster.”

* * *

_Friday, 27 August 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 75._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

After they return to the farm, Lucy shows everyone how to make black powder and uses the bullet press Kate found to make enough .38 Special rounds to reload both of her revolvers as soon as their first batch is done. There are different molds for different kinds of cartridges that fit into the press, a machine with a crank they had to mount on a workbench they bolted to the floor of the big rig back at Home Depot. When she fires the bullets loaded with black powder, her shots are going to have a hell of a lot more kickback because smokeless powder is more a propellant and black powder is more an explosive.

Lucy takes a shower to wash off the chemicals and goes to input the inventory she did of the supplies they collected into a spreadsheet. Daryl is sitting on the steps of her trailer whittling more arrows when their fearless approaches him.

“Hey,” Rick says, “can we talk?”

Daryl squints at him before he looks down at unfinished arrow in his hands. “Sure,” he mutters.

“Lucy won’t even look me in the eye anymore,” Rick tells him with remorse stretched through the quiet tone of his voice.

“Yeah,” Daryl says gruffly, “can ya’ blame her?”

“I guess not,” Rick murmurs.

“Randall was bleedin’ out,” Daryl says. “Why didn’t ya’ just leave him for the zombies?”

“Same reason I didn’t leave your brother on that roof in Atlanta to die of thirst and exposure,” Rick says without hesitation. “I’m not a monster. I can’t sentence a man to death for being guilty by association.”

Daryl narrows his eyes at the former sheriff in warning. “Lucy ain’t a monster, neither.”

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Rick clarifies, “but she’s not thinking clearly—”

“If you came t’ tell me t’ talk sense into my woman or some crap like that,” Daryl cuts in with a growl brewing in the back of his throat, “you should know you’re barkin’ up the wrong tree. Lucy thinks for herself, and she’s a hell of a lot smarter ’n either of us. Randall ain’t the real threat, his group of rapists is. Lucy thinks you don’t have what it takes to deal with ’em and so far y’ain’t done shit to prove her wrong.”

“What would you do in my place?” Rick wants to know.

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils. “Whatever it takes to keep these people safe,” he says, “even if that means we gotta go find those damn rapists and kill ’em all.”


	21. The Enemy Within

_**What did you do today?**_  
**Existed quietly within myself.**  
_**What will you do tomorrow?**_  
**Exist with some degree of force.**

Trista Mateer, “Redacted”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 21**  
The Enemy Within

* * *

_Wednesday, 1 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 80._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Lucy has never been—and will never be—a morning person. Unfortunately, the universe doesn’t give a shit.

Gert has been teaching basic Tae Kwon Do forms to anyone who wants to learn bright and early all week. Lucy has been helping her out and that means she hasn’t been sleeping in until noon. Which might’ve been a problem if her insomnia hadn’t come back with a vengeance, but lack of sleep is a symptom of stress and being scared that a group of rapists is camped out somewhere in her general vicinity is freaking Lucy out.

 _These are desperate times_ , Lucy thinks as she milks one of the dairy cows in the barn while Maggie watches, _desperate measures are called for_.

* * *

_Wednesday, 1 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 80._  
_Williamson, GA;_  
_Sunny D Farms._

* * *

Rick and Shane take Randall eighteen miles out to a school that has become another mass grave in another ghost town. Lucy gives her earpiece to Shane before they drive away because she wants to know how Rick can justify executing this half-assed plan instead of just executing their prisoner. Trouble is, she can’t eavesdrop on them if they’re out of range, so Daryl borrows the keys to Otis’ truck and drives her to a pecan orchard in range of both the farm and where they’re going to set Randall free.

Sunny D Farms was more a spot for pastoral weddings than anything else pre-apocalypse with two barns and a pergola, not to mention the orchard itself. There’s a dead wedding party at the pergola, a zombified bride and groom in decaying formalwear and fifty guests in pews of folding chairs waiting to reanimate.

Lucy draws the semi-automatic .22 caliber pistol she found at Wahoo Firearms and screws the suppressor into place on its threaded barrel. It’s the kind of gun she first learned how to shoot back when she was sixteen. There’s something comfortable about the weight of this weapon in her hands, the dull roar of the kickback against her wrist.

 _You can’t just be the good guy and expect to live_ , she overhears Shane tell Rick on the radio as she pulls the trigger and shifts her stance to aim at her next target as Rick says, _I’m not the good guy anymore_.

Daryl stands by and watches her empty one ten-round clip to thin the herd shambling in their general direction before she pulls another out of her pocket and reloads. It’s sexy as hell, how good of a shot his girl is. Lucy doesn’t get angry or scared like anyone else he’s ever known—she knows how to fine-tune her fear and rage until her feelings become just another weapon in her arsenal. It’s one of the things he loves most about her, the ability to make a weakness into a strength.

After she goes through her second and third clip, Lucy pauses to scoop up the shell casings on the ground and crouches to put them in her backpack. Daryl squints at the twenty-two zombies remaining. _I got six arrows_ , he thinks, _two shots each if she covers my ass_.

It occurs to him that if Merle was here, his brother would be giving him shit and calling him a pussy for letting his girlfriend take out most of these undead fuckers. Daryl snorts at the thought and shoots the zombie shambling a few feet away from her first because his masculinity isn’t so fragile that he can’t let his girl protect him, but he has the instinctual urge to protect her anyhow.

When he draws back the string to nock his last crossbow bolt, Lucy draws her machete and joins the fray. Daryl glances at her in his periphery before he snatches up his arrows. When he looks up, Lucy is staring at a zombie with her gray eyes wide behind her glasses as the dead thing sniffs her before it yowls and shuffles away on stiff legs instead of trying to take a bite out of her. Daryl senses the change in the horde, the moment they all turn to get a whiff of him.

Lucy isn’t prey to them anymore.

“What the hell,” Daryl asks, huffing and puffing. After the horde came at him, he had to drop his crossbow and use his knife to take out most of them. It’s a miracle that he didn’t get bitten or scratched in the process.

“I told you my theory about why all the zombies that bit me never took chunks of flesh,” Lucy wheezes, “because my blood is toxic to the virus even in trace amounts. Apparently,” she clarifies as she wipes her machete on the tulle of the zombie bride’s dress and slips it back in its sheath once the blade is clean, “the virions have gotten smart enough for their final hosts to smell that my blood is anathema to them.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as the adrenaline fizzes through his veins and gauges the distance between them before he lunges at her like some wild animal. Lucy squawks before he stops her mouth with a rough kiss and pulls her flush against him under the pergola with the corpse bride and groom at their feet. Daryl nips at her bottom lip, savoring the soft noises she makes in the back of her throat while he licks into her mouth and cups her face in one hand so the callouses on the pads of his fingers scrape over the sensitive nape of her neck. When he breaks the kiss, Daryl nuzzles her nose and rests his forehead against hers as the calm he only gets from being with her seeps into every nook and cranny of his mind and body. “Sorry,” he tells her softly, “didn’t mean t’ scare ya’.”

Lucy shakes her head slowly. “I wasn’t scared,” she whispers breathlessly, “I was just surprised that killing—re-killing?—zombies made you want to jump my bones.”

Daryl smiles at her with a crooked twist of his mouth that doesn’t show his teeth. Lucy isn’t prey to him, either. “I love ya’,” he whispers back, “ya’ know that?”

Lucy kisses his nose and smiles at the cockeyed look he gives her. “I love you, too.”

* * *

_Wednesday, 1 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 80._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Rick and Shane try to work out their problems in the pigheaded boys will be boys way: by beating the ever-loving shit out of each other. Shane gets trapped in a school bus with a horde of zombies he loosed by throwing a wrench through a window gnawing at the door, and he wouldn’t have gotten out of that alive if Rick hadn’t saved his sorry ass.

Lucy and Daryl are on their way back to the farm with a haul of pecans and produce from the vegetable garden at the orchard when Cath gets through to her on the radio to tell her that Beth tried to kill herself, and Maggie kicked Andrea out of the house for leaving her sister alone with the idea that suicide was a valid option. Daryl sees Lucy thumb the old slub of scar tissue from her own failed attempt at suicide and he stops the truck to take her hand in both of his and kisses the inside of her wrist, softly. Lucy swallows hard because even though he doesn’t say anything, she knows he feels grateful that she failed to die. If she hadn’t failed, they would’ve never met.

 _I learned the hard way that failure isn’t the end of the world_ , Lucy thinks. _Hell, this isn’t even the end of the world. Nothing ends as long as we’re still here_.

Rick knocks on the door of her trailer later that afternoon. When she opens it, he steps into her space without bothering to wait for an invitation and puts her earpiece down on top of her tiny cluttered table. “I hope you learned whatever you wanted to know,” he says. There’s no anger in his voice, only the quiet edge of unanswered questions.

Lucy flicks her gaze to the radio and forces herself to look the former sheriff in the eyes. “I learned that you were stupid today,” she tells him sharply, “not only did you go out with the intention of letting a man who ran with rapists and may be a rapist himself go free, you showed him a weakness he can exploit by doing the toxic masculinity dance with Shane. Why do you think he mentioned that he knows Maggie?” she exhales a huff of air through her nose in a futile attempt to decompress the anxiety blooming deep in her chest before she adds, “Randall is manipulating you.”

“So are you,” Rick points out.

“I’m not denying that,” Lucy retorts, “but at least my intentions are good. I’m trying to keep us safe.”

“Randall is just trying to stay alive,” Rick says.

Lucy nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “Exactly,” she says. “I’m looking out for our people, the people I want to protect. Randall is looking out for himself. What you said, just now? I’m sure that’s how he was able to justify keeping company with rapists and murderers, if not becoming a rapist and a murderer himself.”

Rick narrows his eyes at her. “You’re a murderer,” he reminds her. “You shot a man in cold blood.”

Lucy rolls her eyes at him. “You’re more of a murderer than I am,” she says matter-of-factly. “How many people did you kill in the line of duty? Wasn’t a shootout what put you in a coma? How is this any different?”

“Those were life or death situations,” Rick tells her gravely. “It was me, or them.”

Lucy sighs. “Rick,” she says, “things haven’t changed. It’s us, or them. Unless you want them to rape and kill us. There are only two viable options here: kill Randall and hope like hell his group never finds us, or let Randall go, follow him to where his group is, and kill them all. I wish we could just let Randall go and leave his fate up to the universe. I wish the threat of being raped again wasn’t hanging over my head and making it impossible for me to sleep longer than an hour at a time. I wish—”

“Wait,” Rick interjects, “you were raped?”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound before she adds, “when I was sixteen.”

“Okay,” Rick murmurs, “that actually makes a lot of sense.”

“Don’t do that,” Lucy bites out.

Rick tries not to flinch at the harsh tone of her voice, flat and sharp like a knife. “What?” he asks.

“Don’t give me that look like you get it now,” Lucy snaps at him, “like knowing about my trauma puts things in context for you, like I’m not _thinking clearly_ about this because of what I’ve been through.”

Rick looks away as she throws what he said to Daryl behind her back at him and when he meets her eyes again, the dash of pity is gone and guilt is written in the cringing hunch of his shoulders and the crumpled furrow of his brow.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Lucy clarifies, “it’s not high on my to-do list, but I’m more afraid of losing my friends than I am of being raped again. I’m a hell of a lot stronger now than I was at sixteen. I’m not worried about me. I’m worried about Beth, who’s the same age that I was when I was raped. I’m worried about Sophia, who’s the same age that I was when men your age started ogling me. I’m worried about Carol because she might not think of herself as a rape survivor, but I doubt Ed gave a shit about her consent or her pleasure and he still expected her to fuck him whenever he felt like it because they were married. I’m worried about Duane and Carl and Jimmy because not only do straight men rape other men, they also rape young boys. I’m worried about Lori, who could miscarry if she gets raped. I’m worried about Cath and Kate and Nico because I used to joke with them about how statistically one in four women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime, and that meant they would be safe because of me.”

Rick swallows around the heavy lump in his throat. “We don’t even know where they are,” he says. “We have no idea if they’re as much of a threat as you seem to think.”

Lucy snorts. “What,” she asks caustically, “one of them raping Gilda orally wasn’t enough to convince you they’re dangerous?”

Rick shakes his head. “Exactly,” he says, “one of them did that. We can’t kill Randall for being guilty by association.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood as a frustrated scream dies in her throat. “Look,” she retorts, “semantics aside, it all comes down to the cold equation. How many of our lives do you think Randall is worth?”

Rick clenches his jaw and refuses to respond to that because he knows the right answer to her question is zero—he just doesn’t want to follow that logic through to its natural conclusion.

“I don’t know who or what you’re trying to protect by keeping him alive,” Lucy tells him softly, “but it sure as hell isn’t us.”


	22. Subdivisions

**This is a problem. The world already has**  
**too many of those. I already have too many**  
**of those.**

Daphne Gottlieb, “The Personal Is Political”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 22**  
Subdivisions

* * *

_Thursday, 2 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 81._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

Randall has been hogtied and gagged in the toolshed for eight days now, pissing and shitting in a bucket with enough freedom of movement to wipe his ass but nowhere near enough to slip out of the cuffs on his wrists; and he’s been wearing the same clothes for a week, sweating it out day and night. When the bowhunter steps inside the shed and shuts the door behind him, he grunts as bile rises in his throat at the godawful stink. Rick finally agreed that it makes sense to interrogate their prisoner for information on his group before they decide his fate, but somehow Daryl ends up being the one who gets his hands dirty.

Daryl crouches in front of the prisoner and tugs at the filthy strip of fabric Shane used to muzzle him until it flops around his neck, like a noose with enough rope for a man to hang himself. Randall shoots his mouth off as soon as the gag is gone, but he keeps talking out of his ass instead of answering the damn questions. Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils before he punches Randall in the face until his eye is swollen shut and his own knuckles split open like ripe fruit.

Randall yelps, “I told you—”

“Y’ain’t told me shit!” Daryl shouts and grabs him by the shoulders to slam his head back against the wall.

“I barely knew those guys!” Randall wails. “I-I met ’em on the road!”

“How many in your group?” Daryl asks in a voice that snarls out of his throat.

Randall spits a wad of saliva and blood out of his mouth. “C’mon, man…” he croaks.

Daryl unsheathes his hunting knife and stabs the floor next to the prisoner with a thud of metal tearing into old wood. “How many?” he asks.

Randall squirms in a futile attempt to get away from him even though his back is against the wall. “Uh, thirty—” he answers, “—thirty guys!”

“Where?” Daryl growls.

“I don’t know!” Randall shouts and screams as Daryl rips the bandage off the wound on his leg. “I swear! We were never at any place more than a night…”

“Scoutin’?” Daryl asks as he digs the sharp edge of his knife into the mess of blood and puss oozing out of the open wound. “Plannin’ on stayin’ local?”

“I-I don’t know,” Randall stutters, “they-they left me behind.”

“Ya’ ever pick off a scab?” Daryl asks as he twists the knife.

“C’mon, man!” Randall whines. “I’m trying to cooperate!”

“Start real slow at first,” Daryl sneers. “Sooner or later, you just gotta rip it off.”

Randall squeezes his eyes shut as tears sting at the corners and trickle down, salt in his wounds. “Okay!” he snivels, “they have weapons, heavy stuff, automatics, but I didn’t do anything—”

Daryl scoffs. “Your boys shot at my boys,” he snarls, “tried to take this farm. You just went along for the ride? You tryin’ to tell me you’re innocent?”

Randall nods so fast he almost discombobulates himself. “Yes!” he wails, “these people took me in, and not just guys, a-a whole group of ’em! Men and women. Kids too, just like you people. I thought I’d have a better chance with ’em, y’know?” he babbles as the hunter rises to his feet, “but we’d go out, scavenge, just the men. One night we found this little campsite, a man and his two daughters. Teenagers, y’know? Real young. Real cute…”

Daryl swallows hard as his stomach churns because he can guess what happened. _Lucy was right_ , he thinks, _we gotta hope like hell those men don’t find us before we find ’em and kill ’em all_.

Randall smiles for a fraction of a second, his lips twisting into something ugly. “Their dad,” he says, “he had to watch while these guys, they…” he whispers as the memory of that night creeps in, “…and they didn’t even kill him afterwards, they just made him watch as his daughters…and they just-just-just left him there.”

Daryl glares at him so sharply that it puts the knife in his hands to shame.

Randall flinches and slumps against the wall as salty tears smear the dirt on his cheeks. “No,” he bleats at him, “but-but-but I didn’t touch those girls! No, I swear, I didn’t. Please! Please, you gotta believe me, man. I’m not like that,” he yowls as Daryl stomps on his wounded leg, “I ain’t like that. Please! Please, you gotta believe me…”

Daryl gnashes his teeth and sheathes his knife before he kicks Randall in the stomach to knock the wind out of him, and punches him in the face over and over until he feels the knuckles on his other hand split; until all he sees is red.

* * *

When he emerges from the dark inside the shed, Daryl squints at the sunshine and every drop of rage seeps out of him at the sight of his girl sitting in a folding chair with her first-aid kit. Daryl has seen her shoot a man in the throat just to watch him bleed out, but he still thinks of her as sweetness that he wants to gorge himself on until his dying day, as light that chases every shadow away. Lucy rises to her feet and takes one of his hands in both of hers to get a look at his knuckles, her soft fingertips so gentle on his wrist that his heart breaks a little bit. Daryl grunts and sucks in a sharp hiss as she meticulously disinfects his torn knuckles with alcohol swabs. “You hear all that?” he asks her softly.

“Yup,” Lucy answers with a heavy sigh instead of popping the _p_ sound like she always does, “every word.”

Daryl scrutinizes her as she rubs antibiotic ointment into the abrasions on his hand and starts wrapping gauze around his knuckles. “You think he told me the truth?” he wants to know.

“I think he told you what he thought you wanted to hear,” Lucy says, “but he slipped up.”

“How’s that?” Daryl asks. It was obvious to him that Randall told him the story of the rape to distract him from asking the same questions over and over again, but he wants to know what she heard that he might’ve missed.

“When he was talking about watching the other men in his group rape those underage girls,” Lucy murmurs, “he focused on the feeling of powerlessness their father must’ve felt instead of how traumatic it was for the girls themselves. Randall has more empathy for the man they emasculated than the underage girls they violated, and that makes me think violence towards women doesn’t bother him as much as the idea of going through something traumatic himself.”

Daryl nods brusquely. “Yeah,” he says.

“I also think he lied about not being a rapist,” Lucy informs him flatly, “but it’s just a gut feeling. I don’t know if I can trust it.”

Daryl puts his hand under her chin and tilts her face up so he can look her in the eyes. “You’ve got pretty good instincts, darlin’,” he drawls. “You should trust ’em more often.”

Lucy bites her bottom lip as she blushes pink and brings his other hand to her mouth to kiss his fingers. “Thank you,” she mumbles to the gauze wrapped around his knuckles.

Daryl strokes her flushed cheek with his calloused thumb. “You missed,” he says gruffly before he ducks his head and slants his lips over hers to kiss her soft and slow.

There’s a small part of Daryl that isn’t sure he should be touching her with blood on his hands, but it’s too late for that to stop him. Lucy is his until she tells him otherwise, and in the meantime he’s going to take as much of her as she wants to give.

* * *

It’s a beautiful day for torture, with a cool breeze fizzling out the humidity that has plagued them all summer. Rick stands in the middle of the campsite with Shane beside him as tension fulminates in the silence punctuated only by the licking flames of the fire they started to cook their breakfast.

“So,” Lori glances at her husband and pours Carl a cup of water from a metal pitcher before she asks, “what are you gonna do? I think we’d all feel better if we knew the plan.”

Andrea folds her arms tight across her chest. “Do you even have a plan?” she wants to know.

Glenn flicks his gaze to his twin. Although the bruise on her cheek has healed by now, Gilda is still hurting in less in-your-face ways. “We can’t keep him here,” he says.

Rick turns to see Shane looking at him expectantly. “We’ll know soon enough,” he says gravely.

Daryl clears his throat as he walks into the semicircle of people crowded around the campfire burning in the daylight. “Your boy there’s got a gang of thirty men,” he tells Rick gruffly, “they got heavy artillery and they ain’t lookin’ to make friends. If they roll through here, our boys are dead, and our women, they’re gonna…” he swallows hard and steals a glance at Lucy before he says, “…they’re gonna wish they were.”

Carol narrows her eyes at the bloodstained gauze wrapped around his knuckles. “What did you do?” she asks.

“Had a little chat,” Daryl mutters.

“Those men Randall talked about gangraped two underage girls in front of their father,” Lucy clarifies. “Randall says he didn’t rape anyone, but he called their victims cute while he was telling Daryl that horror story so I’m not buying his innocent act.”

“Okay,” Rick says, “no one goes near this guy.”

“Rick,” Lori says in a hushed voice, “what are you gonna do?”

“We have no choice,” Rick tells her in the same hushed tone before he raises his voice and says, “he’s a threat. We have to eliminate the threat.”

Dale frowns, the space between his eyebrows furrowing into a wrinkle of disbelief. “You’re just going to kill him?” he asks.

Shane nods, but doesn’t answer the question out loud because he knows Dale wasn’t asking him.

Rick clenches his jaw and squares his shoulders. “It’s settled,” he says. “We’ll do it today.”

“You can’t do this,” Dale says urgently as he follows Rick through the field of grass. “You don’t want to do this. I know you don’t.”

“I thought about it all night,” Rick bites out, “and knowing what we know now, I don’t see a way out of it.”

“You can’t just decide on your own to take someone’s life!” Dale says and flails his hands frantically as his voice pitching higher in distress. “There’s gotta be a…a process.”

“What would that be?” Rick wants to know. “We can’t call witnesses, or go before a judge.”

“So he’s automatically guilty by association and sentenced to death?” Dale asks incredulously, “he’s just a kid! Give me some time to talk to everyone, try to figure out another way—”

“We can’t drag this out!” Rick snaps at him, “people are scared!”

Dale nods. “Which is why they need time to discuss this,” he says.

“No,” Rick holds up one hand to stop him before he says anything else, “they need to be safe. I owe these people that.”

“You think about your son!” Dale shouts and jabs an accusing finger at the former sheriff, “the message that you’re giving him: shoot first, think later. I’m asking for one day to talk to everybody. You can give me that. Rick, think about Carl—”

“I am,” Rick tells him through clenched teeth. “We reconvene at sunset. Then what happens, happens. Dale, one way or another, this ends tonight.”

* * *

Dale tries to talk his idea of sense into Andrea first, appealing to her sense of justice as a civil rights attorney. Amy points out that Andrea only became a lawyer because of how limited the law was pre-apocalypse, how injustice could survive and thrive in a civilized society. Dale thinks of humanity as something inalienable, but anyone who isn’t a straight white man knows that people seen as the phenomenological other were fighting tooth and nail to keep their humanity before the dead could walk. Andrea still agrees to guard Randall, but that doesn’t mean she agrees with his philosophy.

After he leaves Amy in the RV, the old man goes to knock on the solar-paneled door of the trailer. Only he doesn’t get a chance to knock, because Daryl swings the door wide open before he gets close enough to touch the metal and scrutinizes him through eyes narrowed into slits. “Carol send ya’?” he asks.

Dale shakes his head slowly. “Carol’s not the only one who’s concerned about you,” he says, “and your new role in the group.”

“I don’t need my head shrunk,” Daryl mutters, “this group’s broken. I’m better off fendin’ for myself,” he glances over his shoulder at Lucy before he adds, “protectin’ what’s mine.”

Dale sighs. “I need you to stand with me,” he says beseechingly, “try to save this kid’s life.”

Daryl snorts. “I didn’t peg you for a desperate sumbitch,” he deadpans.

Dale adjusts his grip on the rifle he has slung over his shoulder. It feels heavier, all of a sudden. “Your opinion makes a difference,” he says.

“Ain’t nobody lookin’ t’ me for nothin’,” Daryl snarls at him.

“Lucy has been,” Dale points out, “Carol is, and I am. Right now. You have Rick’s ear.”

“Rick looks t’ Shane, or Morgan,” Daryl retorts, “let him.”

Dale shakes his head again. “You’re the only person in the group who went out looking for Sophia every day,” he says. “That didn’t go unnoticed. Torturing people? That isn’t you. You’re a decent man. Shane…” he frowns at the memory of catching the former deputy trying to kill his best friend on two separate occasions, “…he’s different.”

“Why’s that?” Daryl asks, “’cause he killed Otis?”

Dale frowns until his forehead is nothing but a bunch of wrinkles under the brim of his fishing hat. “Shane tell you that?” he wants to know.

“Nah,” Daryl mutters, “he told some story ’bout how Otis covered him and saved his ass, but he showed up with the dead guy’s gun. Rick ain’t stupid. If he didn’t figure that shit out, it’s ’cause he didn’t wanna. Look, it’s like I said: the group’s broken.”

Dale heaves another sigh. “Where’s Lucy?” he asks. “I want to talk to her, see where she stands on all of this.”

“Nope,” Daryl growls at him, “last thing she needs is a sanctimonious old prick tryin’ t’ convince her that Randall is worth savin’. You stay the hell away from her.”

* * *

After the redneck slams the door in his face, Dale spends the rest of the afternoon trying to talk the others into seeing his side of things. Unfortunately for him, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket and no one wants to have a philosophical debate about the cold equation during the end times. Dale is desperate enough by the end of the day to approach Shane, who looks smug now that he thinks everything is going his way.

Shane eyes the rifle the old man is carrying and leans back against the Hyndai he was loading up with one hand on the grip of the handgun tucked into the waistband of his pants. “What’s up, Dale?” he asks.

“I want to change your mind,” Dale answers.

“What,” Shane arches his eyebrows at him before he exhales a snort of laughter that oozes cynicism as thick as molasses, “you serious?”

“I know you and I will never see eye-to-eye on much,” Dale says, “but you’re not going anywhere—”

“Nope,” Shane cuts in sharply.

“—and I’m not going anywhere,” Dale continues, “so let’s talk about this like men.”

Shane cocks his head in concession. “Okay,” he says. “You denying we’re in danger from this guy, Dale?”

Dale shakes his head. “No,” he says, “but there’s two dozen of us and one of him.”

Shane rolls his eyes. “Yeah,” he retorts, “but there’s thirty of them.”

“Killing him doesn’t change that,” Dale points out, “but it changes us.”

Shane laughs outright at that and the harsh edge of that sound is enough to make the old man wince. “You’ve got balls, Dale. I’m gonna give you that,” he says, “now I’ll tell you what. When y’all gather in a little bit, you’re gonna talk about this. If you convince the group to keep this guy alive, then I ain’t gonna say a damn word about it, but I’m telling you now man-to-man that you’re wrong. When this guy rapes or kills somebody, I ain’t gonna need to say anything, ’cause that blood? It’s gonna be on you. You’re wrong about this, Dale…” he says before he walks away from the horrified man in front of him, “…dead wrong.”

Famous last words.


	23. Grand Designs

**By listening we will understand who we are in this holy realm of words.**  
**Do not parade, pleased with yourself.**  
**You must speak in the language of justice.**

Joy Harjo, “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 23**  
Grand Designs

* * *

_Thursday, 2 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 81._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

When dawn goes down to dusk, the so-called adults in the group cluster in a room lit by burning daylight to seal the fate of the prisoner in the toolshed. Beth is still in bed, with Jimmy watching over her while he tries not to let her see that she broke his heart the moment that she slit her wrist and he doesn’t know how to fix that; nor does he seem to understand that she doesn’t need fixing. Duane is teaching Sophia to play chess with a portable set he brought with a photograph of his mother tucked inside the foldable board underneath the assorted black and white pieces. Carl lingers in the hallway until Lori shoos him upstairs, and Lucy narrows her eyes at the muck and bits of dried leaves all over the curious boy in the sheriff’s hat. Daryl has been missing the .38 Special he found in a tent during the search for Sophia, and she has a hunch that Carl took it into the woods to play with dead things. It’s what she would’ve done, if she were an overprotected twelve-year-old in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Daryl is standing behind the antique loveseat upholstered in faded pink fabric where Lucy is sitting next to Cath, with a sleepy Romy occupying the space between them and Harley on the floor by their feet. Kate towers over everyone else in the room to the left of the loveseat while Nico stands to the right with her arms folded. Gert, Gilda, and Glenn are seated on the bench in front of the upright piano that hasn’t been played in months. Andrea, Amy, T-Dog, Jacqui, and Morgan are crowded in front of the cold fireplace where Shane is leaning on the mantle. Patricia is sitting in a chair with upholstery that might’ve been white once upon a time when it was new, but has yellowed with age over the years. Maggie is seated on the couch to her left, and Hershel slumps with his elbows digging into his knees on the couch next to her. Carol stands against the backdoor, keeping it open to feel the crisp air float inside. Lori is leaning up against the other side of the entryway as she watches Carl go upstairs. Rick moves to stand with his wife, but he doesn’t get close enough to touch her. Dale blocks the doorway that leads into the kitchen, taking up space in the obstructive way that men do without a care in the world.

“So how do we do this?” Glenn asks, “just take a vote?”

“Does it have to be unanimous?” Andrea wants to know.

“How about majority rules?” Lori suggests.

“Let’s just see where everybody stands,” Rick says. “Then we can talk through the options.”

“Well,” Shane says, “the way I see it, there’s only one way to move forward.”

“Killing him,” Dale cuts in bitterly. “I mean, why even bother to take a vote? It’s clear which way the wind’s blowing.”

“Well,” Rick says and flails one hand awkwardly while he talks, “if people believe we should spare him, I want to know.”

“I can tell you it’s a small group,” Dale sighs, “maybe just me and Glenn.”

Glenn shakes his head slowly. “Look,” he says, “I think you’re pretty much right about everything, all the time, but one of the men from his group raped my twin and the rest of them would’ve done a lot worse to both of my sisters if they hadn’t gotten away. Randall isn’t one of us, and we’ve…” he swallows hard and glances at Maggie, “we’ve lost too many people already.”

Dale frowns and turns to face the farmer’s daughter. “How about you?” he asks with an accusing jab of his fist curled tight around his fishing hat, “do you agree with this?”

Maggie rises to her feet and folds her arms. “I don’t want him anywhere near us,” she says tersely.

“Wait,” Patricia interjects, “couldn’t we continue keeping him prisoner?”

“Just another mouth t’ feed,” Daryl mutters.

Hershel nods. “It may be a lean winter,” he adds.

“We could ration better,” Lori suggests.

Nico snorts. “Don’t talk about rationing when you’re eating for two and you’ve never contributed to our food supply,” she says.

“Randall could be an asset,” Dale tries to point out. “We could give him a chance to prove himself.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek hard enough to draw blood. It mixes with the bile in her mouth, the visceral squelch of anxiety that starts deep in her gut and creeps into her brain like a silent alarm. Lucy wants to scream, wants to shoot Randall in the face herself, wants to drive off into the sunset with her best friends and Daryl to form a society where no woman ever has to put up with men perpetuating rape culture ever again.

“What,” Kate says, “to prove that he’s not a rapist? How is that a risk you’re willing to take?”

Rick shakes his head and clenches his jaw around a frustrated noise. “We’re not letting him walk around,” he snaps.

“We could put an escort on him,” Patricia says.

Shane rolls his eyes at her. “Who wants to volunteer for that duty?” he scoffs.

“I will,” Dale says.

“I don’t think any of us should be walking around with this guy,” Lori murmurs. “I wouldn’t feel safe unless he was tied up.”

“We can’t exactly chain him up in the yard and sentence him to hard labor,” Amy says.

Shane nods. “Look,” he says curtly, “let’s say we let him join us, right? Well, maybe he’s helpful, maybe he’s nice. We let our guard down and maybe he runs off, brings back his thirty men.”

“So the answer is to kill him to prevent a crime that he may never even attempt?” Dale shouts, his mouth gaping open incredulously. “If we do this, we’re saying there’s no hope. Rule of law is dead, there is no civilization—”

“Sure,” Jacqui says in a soft voice that drips sarcasm like honey, “because civilization was perfect before.”

“Yeah,” T-Dog adds, “and the law protected everyone and we were all equal.”

“Well,” Hershel says, “could you drive him further out? Leave him like you planned?”

“You barely came back last time,” Lori says with a trembling edge of fear in her voice. “There are hordes of zombies around every corner. You could break down. Or get lost.”

“Or get ambushed,” Daryl mutters.

Gilda nods. “You’re both right,” she says.

“We shouldn’t put our own people at risk,” Glenn adds.

Gert adjusts her cat’s eye glasses and looks up at Rick. “How would you do it?” she asks. “Would he suffer?”

“What about the body?” Morgan wants to know, “do we bury him?”

“Hold on!” Dale shouts frantically. “You’re talking about this like it’s already decided!”

“You’ve been talkin’ all day,” Daryl murmurs, “goin’ around in circles. You just wanna go around in circles again?”

“This is a young man’s life,” Dale snaps back at him, “and it is worth more than a five-minute conversation!” Then he turns to look at Rick. “This is what it’s come to?” he says and it’s more of an accusation than a question, “killing someone because we can’t decide what else to do with him? You saved him and now look at us. How are we any better than those people that we’re so afraid of?”

“Would you still be defending Randall if he was black or brown?” T-Dog asks to break the grave silence that falls over the room.

Dale frowns at that and hesitates for a fraction of a second as Jacqui and Morgan look at him expectantly. “Yes!” he splutters. “I’m not defending him because he’s white! I’m defending him because he’s a young man with no one in his corner. I know Randall made a mistake when he fell in with the wrong people, but he was just doing what he thought he had to do to survive—”

“We all know what needs to be done here,” Shane says.

“No,” Rick grits out, “Dale is right. We can’t leave any stone unturned here.”

“We haven’t come up with a single viable option yet,” Andrea says. “I wish we could—”

“Then we have to work on it!” Dale shouts over her.

“We are,” Rick tells him sharply.

“Stop it!” Carol shrieks. “I’m sick of everybody arguing and fighting. We didn’t ask for this. You can’t ask us to decide something like this. Please just decide, either of you, both of you, but leave me out of it.”

“There’s no difference between not speaking out and killing him yourself,” Dale tells her in a tone so harsh that Carol flinches at the anger in his voice.

“Alright,” Rick snaps at him, “that’s enough. Anybody who wants the floor before we make a final decision, speak now.”

“You once said that we don’t kill the living,” Dale blurts out before anybody else has a chance to say anything.

“Well,” Rick says gravely, “that was before the living tried to kill us.”

Dale chokes back tears. “Rick, don’t you see?” he says, “if we do this, the people that we were…the world that we knew is dead. This world is ugly, it’s harsh, it’s survival of the fittest, and that’s a world I don’t want to live in. I don’t believe that any of you do. I _can’t_. This should be our moment to rally together, to remake the world. Please,” he begs. “Let’s just do what’s right.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Lucy snarls.

Dale turns to look at her, wide-eyed. “What?” he asks.

Lucy glares at him from behind her glasses with so much vitriol in her gray eyes that he gulps and takes an involuntary step away from her. “Shut the fuck up, you sanctimonious _asshole_ ,” she tells him caustically. “Stop acting like you have any idea what the hell you’re talking about, because you don’t. Preserving your high and mighty, holier than thou morality isn’t worth me being raped again. It sure as hell isn’t worth the same thing happening to any of the women in this house,” she keeps one fist clenched around the handle of her cane and sweeps her other hand out to show him what’s at stake here, “or any of the men, for that matter. Our world has always been harsh, it’s always been ugly, and the only reason you think it wasn’t is that you had white male privilege. Men like you are the reason I was afraid to report my rape,” she tells him in a voice with a sweet bite of viciousness. “Men like you look at Randall and think he’s a nice young man who deserves a chance, even though at best he stood by and watched two underage girls get gangraped and at worst he joined in and lied about what a piece of shit he is to save his own skin. Men like you are part of the problem, not the solution. If you think a group of men raping and killing me and my friends is a risk worth taking, then I don’t trust you and no woman should.”

Rick swallows hard. “Anybody else?” he asks solemnly.

“Look,” Nico chimes in, bold as brass, “we’re talking about punishing Randall for what he might’ve done and what he might do if we set him free, so why don’t we test him? Pretend to let him go. Daryl can follow him on foot—he’s a hunter, he can go unnoticed by his prey—and we can send a car to follow them if Randall goes out of range of the radio. Then we can find out where his group is, we’ll have a tactical advantage, and we can watch to see whether or not Randall is going to lead those men to our door.”

“What if Randall does exactly that?” Rick wants to know.

“Then we kill them all before they get here,” Kate says. _Obviously_ goes unspoken, but not unheard.

Dale frowns at her so hard his forehead starts to furrow as the horror makes itself at home on his face. “You’re suggesting that we slaughter thirty men instead of one,” he says.

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Lucy says, “but we still have to acknowledge that outcome as a possibility and plan for the worst. I’m not saying violence is _the_ answer to our problems, but it always has to be an answer. There’s no other way to stay alive, sometimes.”

Daryl puts his hand on her shoulder, the heel of his palm a gentle pressure on top of the words etched into her skin in a dead language: _we gladly feast on those who would subdue us_. Lucy intertwines her fingers with his and squeezes his hand, mindful of the wounds on his knuckles as she swallows the blood in her mouth.

“I think it might be more humane to just shoot him and get this over with,” Amy says.

Dale shuts his eyes tight as his tears sting and threaten to fall. “Are y’all going to watch, too?” he asks. “No, you’ll go hide in your tents and try to forget that we’re slaughtering a human being.” Then he shakes his head and starts to leave the room before he stops next to Daryl. “This group is broken,” he whispers and walks out.


	24. Hand Over Fist

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : There is smut in this chapter—specifically Daryl and Lucy fucking in the woods—because I am terrible. Beware.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Neck Kissing, Biting, Foreplay, Breastplay, Nipple Play, Nipple Licking, First Time, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Forest Sex, Come Marking.

**The body is a place of violence. Wolf teeth, amputated hands.**  
**Cover yourself with a cloak of leaves, a coat of a thousand furs,**  
**a paper dress. The dark forest has a code.**

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Introduction to the Body in Fairytales”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 24**  
Hand Over Fist

* * *

_Thursday, 2 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 81._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

It takes almost two hours for twilight to fade slowly into full dark, the moon a sliver in the night sky. Lucy shuffles into the barn and sits on a rung of the ladder that leads to the hayloft with a lantern in her hand.

Nico leans against the ladder to her left and narrows her eyes at the shadows in the dark corners of the barn. “You think Rick’ll go through with it?” she asks.

Lucy shrugs. “I wouldn’t bet the farm on it,” she murmurs.

Kate snorts at the pun. “Rick’s a coward,” she says, “ten bucks says he chickens out before he pulls the trigger.”

Cath glances at the holsters on her best friend’s belt: two .38 Special revolvers and a .22 caliber pistol. “You planning to shoot Randall yourself?” she wants to know.

Lucy shakes her head slowly. “I want to see what Rick does,” she says, “and if he chickens out then his only logical recourse is the plan we came up with: to let Randall go and follow him to wherever his group is.”

“You want him to fail,” Cath deduces.

Lucy cocks her head owlishly. “I want him to make the right call,” she clarifies, “but something tells me that he won’t, and if I’m right…” she gnaws on the inside of her cheek and exhales a heavy gust of air, “…if I’m right, then we’re not safe here.”

On the bright side, now that she knows the flesh-eating monsters are scared of her she can leave anytime she wants and go anywhere she wants. On the dark side, if she and her friends left they would be vulnerable to attack from groups like Randall’s and whoever killed the Vatos gang, assuming it wasn’t the same people.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress. “What if I wanted to leave?” she whispers. “What if I wanted to take our contributions to the food supply and our rig full of guns and go find someplace where we could all sleep comfortably, where we could fortify pre-existing defenses, where I could assemble the equipment and components I need to synthesize a vaccine? Would you follow me?”

“You know we would,” Nico tells her matter-of-factly.

Kate nods succinctly. “It’s us against the world,” she adds, “and even though the world technically ended two months ago, that hasn’t changed.”

Lucy swallows thickly and smiles, but it withers on her lips as Rick opens the barn door with an ominous creak and Shane unceremoniously shoves Randall inside. Daryl catches her eye and holds her gaze as they surround the prisoner in a square with Morgan, Rick, and Shane in the other corners. It makes her think of the obsolete idea of a flat earth, a myth that said the planet was shaped like a disc with four quarters and four rivers that ran to meet in the center of the world.

Rick glances at her and her friends while he loads the chambers of his Colt, the clink of the bullets making Randall cringe in horror. “Would you like to stand or kneel?” he asks.

“No,” Randall wails. “Please—”

Daryl clenches his jaw and knocks Randall onto his knees with one blow to his injured leg. Morgan looks from Daryl to Rick while Rick looks to Shane, who nods. “Do you have any final words?” the former sheriff asks the prisoner.

“Please,” Randall stutters out as Rick points the Colt at his head and clicks the safety off, “don’t…don’t…”

Lucy can see the inner turmoil that has been dogging his steps ever since he saved Randall from being impaled and eaten alive by the living dead written all over Rick’s face, how wrong he believes this necessary evil is. It should horrify her, but all she feels is numb. Lucy felt unsafe in her own body for eleven years before the fall of civilization, and the anxiety she cultivated in response to her trauma has become a rational fear in the event of a zombie apocalypse. It has made her stronger, made her smarter, made her a better survivor.

Carl walks into the barn as Rick hesitates to pull the trigger, a shadow of a small boy in a sheriff’s hat. “Do it, Dad,” he says. “Do it.”

Rick chickens out as Shane goes to talk to his son and Randall blubbers on his knees in front of him. “Take him away,” he whispers. “Take him away.”

Lucy sighs as Nico opens the wallet she habitually carries in the back pocket of her jeans and hands Kate a crumpled ten-dollar bill.

Daryl growls low in his throat. “Get up,” he snarls and grabs the prisoner by the collar of his shirt before he drags him back out into the night.

Rick glances at the girls over his shoulder with a stricken look on his face and puts his gun back in its holster before he walks over to his son with heavy footsteps and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

“So,” Nico says. “What now?”

“Rick put Carl first,” Cath says, “that makes him a good father.”

“It also makes him a bad leader,” Kate points out, “and where the hell is Lori? Why wasn’t she watching Carl?”

Nico snorts because they all know Carl has been walking around without adult supervision ever since Hershel said he was well enough to leave his sickbed. Lori has been following the example her husband set by not taking this threat seriously. Which isn’t her fault, because living at the farm has made it easy for everyone to forget how dangerous the world has become. Lori wants to forget, wants to keep herself busy with cooking and cleaning and turning household chores into a coping mechanism, wants to feel safe.

 _There’s the rub_ , Lucy thinks as she hooks the lantern into the crook of her elbow and uses her cane to get back on her feet. _We’re not safe. We never were_.

Dale screams and shouts bloody murder a fraction of a second later. Cath and Nico run to find him while Kate hangs back and walks with Lucy, who can’t run. Daryl gets to the old man first and stabs the zombie that clawed his stomach to shreds in the head before he yells for help.

Lucy gnaws on her left thumbnail without biting through it and tries not to laugh at the irony. Dale was smart enough to understand what Darwin meant by natural selection. It doesn’t mean only the strongest will survive. It’s not survival of the fittest. It means any organisms that fail to adapt to their environment will go extinct.

Rick hollers for someone to get Hershel while Andrea falls to her knees beside Dale and puts her hands on his shoulders, tears pricking at the corners of her eyes like tiny thorns. Amy shines her flashlight on the wound and covers her mouth with her other hand as Hershel slows to a halt at her side.

“What can we do?” Rick asks, “can we move him?”

Hershel shakes his head with slow finality. “No,” he says, “he won’t make the trip.”

“Bleeding out from a gut wound takes hours,” Amy whispers more to herself than anyone else, “it’s slow and painful.”

“Rick,” Andrea wails softly, “he’s suffering. Do something.”

Lucy catches a glimpse of Carl looking at the corpse of the zombie that gutted him with a hint of recognition mixed in with the horror on his face before he runs to Lori and buries his sobs in the circle of her arms. There’s a cacophony of wounded sounds rioting all around her, resonant howls of mourning.

Rick draws his gun as Dale chokes on his own blood. Andrea turns away because she doesn’t want to see them shoot him in the head, but she keeps holding his hand in both of hers to show him that he’s not alone in the end. Rick stands there rooted to the spot until Daryl takes the Colt out of his hand and crouches next to Dale before he clicks the safety off.

Lucy swallows thickly and shuffles over to put the hand she isn’t using to grip her cane on his shoulder, above the demons inked on his skin that lurk under the white angel wings he wears on his back. Daryl can’t look at her, but he can’t bring himself to shrug and make her take her hand off him; instead he covers the back of her soft hand with his rough palm and squeezes hard as Dale looks at him.

 _You’re a decent man_ , Dale had said to him a few hours ago, like he meant it.

“Sorry, brother,” Daryl says, like he means it, and pulls the trigger.

* * *

_Thursday, 2 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 81._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Dark Forest._

* * *

After he gives the Colt Python back to the coward who couldn’t pull the fucking trigger himself, Daryl abruptly turns and drags Lucy through the fields of grass to the edge of the dark forest. It feels like something is gnawing at him, anger snarling deep in his chest and tears clawing at the corners of his eyes.

Daryl is overwhelmed by the urge to hit something. It terrifies him, because he knows the urge to lash out with his rage and hurt someone to make himself feel better is his father talking. Will Dixon is dead, he died three months ago in the woods of DeKalb County at the hands and teeth of the first zombies he ever saw. Daryl watched him die and he didn’t put him out of his misery because he wanted his father to suffer for all the shit he did to him, to Merle, to their mother. Dale might’ve been a sanctimonious old prick, but he deserved mercy. Until that moment, Daryl hadn’t known he could be merciful because he thought his father had beaten that out of him a long damn time ago.

Lucy huffs. “Daryl,” she whispers, “slow down. I can’t walk—”

Daryl grinds to a halt and turns to look at her, at the only thing in this world that makes any sense to him anymore. There’s no fear in her, no judgment, only indignant wheezes and love. Daryl squints at Lucy in the dark and pushes her up against the tree behind her with his whole body, both of his calloused hands cupping her plump face before he kisses her hard and rough and deep.

When he kisses her, Lucy kisses him back and he tastes like tears, salt and true cinnamon. It feels so good to stop thinking and feel better, his thumbs caressing her cheeks while he licks into her mouth and strokes her tongue with his to make a hot mess of sensation that melts her from the inside out. Daryl kisses her until the fear twisted up inside her fades away, until all she can feel is the heat of his body and her own heart thumping wildly in her chest.

Daryl breaks the kiss and pulls back to look at her with his eyes narrowed in confusion, like he expected her to push him away. Lucy cocks her head and she feels so comfortable with him that it doesn’t take a herculean effort for her to meet his eyes, unflinching.

“You’ve been holding back,” she whispers breathlessly. “I know we’re happy together, but something has been pissing you off and I think it’s that you failed to find us.”

Daryl frowns at her, his lips twisting. “What?” he whispers back.

“Rick asked you to oversee the search for Sophia and me and Jacqui,” Lucy clarifies, “and even though I brought that little girl back to her mother safe and sound, you almost died trying to find us and you still failed. Sophia is fine, I’m fine, Jacqui is fine, and because of that you have nowhere to put your anger. I stopped you from taking it out on Carol in the stables, you tried to take it out on Randall by beating the crap out of him, and you took it upon yourself to put Dale out of his misery because Rick didn’t have the balls to do it himself—”

“I don’t give a shit what Rick thinks of me,” Daryl snarls at her and hisses the sibilant in _shit_ , “I don’t owe him nothin’.”

“You do give a shit, Daryl,” Lucy says. “You care so much it scares the shit out of you, and that’s okay. It’s okay to mourn Dale because he saw the good in you and now he’s dead. It’s okay to give yourself a chance to belong somewhere. It’s okay to let yourself be happy. You deserve that,” she tells him softly. “You deserve everything.”

Daryl tangles one hand in the hair at the nape of her neck where her braid is loose and kisses her again, desperately. Lucy hooks one arm around his neck and drops her cane on the ground as she goes on tiptoe in between his body and the tree, its bark digging into her back through the fabric of her dress as she wraps her other arm around him to splay her fingers over the hollow in between his shoulder blades and feel him through his shirt and his vest. Daryl nips at her lower lip before he kisses her chin and works his way along her jaw, nuzzling her throat and sucking on where her pulse thrums under the delicate skin of her neck while he unbuckles the wide belt around her waist and undoes the buttons on the front of her dress.

Lucy is wearing her polka-dot bra, and he hums low in his throat to show his appreciation before he gets her tits out without bothering to unhook the clasp of her bra and lifts them up so he can lick and suck on both of her nipples at once. Daryl cups her breasts in his hands to feel the full weight of them, squeezing the soft flesh with his fingers while he gently bites her nipples until she tugs her bottom lip between her teeth to muffle a scream. Lucy gasps at the rasp of his stubble on her skin and digs her fingers into his shoulders. Daryl rubs her nipples in between the rough pads of his thumbs and forefingers while he kisses back up from the tops of her tits to suck a bruise into the side of her neck. When he slips his hand under her skirt and rubs his thumb against the heat of her pussy through her panties, Lucy bucks her hips against his hand and winces as the bark digs into her back again.

Daryl squints at her in the dark and kisses her cheek. “Sorry,” he says gruffly before he strips out of his vest and unbuttons his shirt.

Lucy arches her eyebrows at him as Daryl crouches to spread his shirt out on the ground by her lantern and stays on his knees to watch her shrug out of her dress and unhook her own bra. It takes a few extra seconds of fumbling because her wrist doesn’t bend, and he smiles as she folds her dress before she puts her belt and her bra on top of the pile.

“C’mere,” Daryl says and puts his hands on her hips to pull her down on all fours.

Lucy drops onto her elbows and knees because she can’t put both palms flat on the ground and looks back at him over her shoulder with her glasses fogged up around the edges, her cheeks flushed hot in the dark.

Daryl hunches over her to nuzzle the nape of her neck and kisses where the bark dug into the soft curve of her back. _Lucy bruises like a fuckin’ peach_ , he thinks, _she’s gonna feel me pushin’ her up against that damn tree for days_. “Your pussy’s nice and wet for me,” he drawls. “I can smell it. You think I’ve been holdin’ back?” he nips at her shoulder and soothes the sting of his teeth with the flat of his tongue. “I ain’t gonna hold nothin’ back now. You want me?”

Lucy bites her lip and nods. “Yes,” she whispers. “I want you.”

“You’ve got me,” Daryl whispers back and rubs his hips against her fat ass in a slow grind. “You’re _mine_ ,” he growls and slips one of his hands over the flab of her belly and into her panties, “and I’m yours.”

Lucy whimpers as his fingers spread her open and he swirls one fingertip around her aching wet hole. When he ruts his hips against her and she feels the heat of his cock through his jeans, she almost has a panic attack because this reminds her of how she was raped—facedown with her hands held above her head while her boyfriend at the time forced himself inside of her—before she sucks in a sharp breath and inhales. Daryl smells like sweat, musk, leather, and motor oil mixed with something woodsy and earthy that clings to his skin. It’s nothing like the sense memory of her rapist, who reeked of the body odor that plagues all teenage boys. Daryl is a man, not a boy, and he loves her. It’s enough to clear the cobwebs of bad memories out of her mind so she can let herself make new memories with him. No moment of panic. No hesitation. No fear.

Daryl kisses her neck, shoulders, and back almost reverently while he fucks her slowly and thoroughly until she comes from the coil of his fingers inside her and the friction of the heel of his hand on top of her clit. Lucy shudders and moans softly at the sound of him unbuckling his belt and unzipping his jeans before he pushes the crotch of her panties aside. Daryl rubs the blunt head of his cock against the gleam of her soft, hot pussy and tilts her head up so he can kiss her over her shoulder while he buries himself inside of her.

Lucy moans into his mouth and he swallows the sweetness of that noise as her pussy squeezes him like a vice, tight and hot and so fucking wet. Daryl breaks the kiss and grunts at the effort it takes not to throw caution to the wind and fuck her like he wants to because in spite of all his big talk about not holding back, he knows this is her first time and he doesn’t want to hurt her. Lucy shakes her hips up and back against his in a slow revolution as she adapts to the feeling of being full of him. “I can take it,” she informs him with a raw edge of need in her voice that makes his dick twitch and throb deep inside her, “give it to me.”

Daryl groans and pulls almost all the way out before he hunches over her to adjust the angle of his hips and slips into her again, his breath hot on the back of her neck as the head of him rubs against the deepest part of her. Lucy slaps one of her hands over her mouth to muffle the screams he tears out of her as her hard nipples rub against the soft fabric of his shirt underneath her and she turns her head so her glasses won’t go cockeyed. Daryl grunts because every thrust yanks on his stitches, but he doesn’t give a shit because the pain is nothing compared to how good it feels to bottom out inside her with every stroke while her sweet little pussy clenches around him. When she comes on his cock, he feels his balls tighten almost violently in response and pulls out to turn her over before he comes all over her tits and stomach.

Lucy stares at him with her gray eyes wide behind her glasses and glances down at the thick spurts of his spunk on her skin before she smiles at him in the shy way she has that makes his heart stutter deep in his chest. “I owe Cath and Nico twenty bucks,” she deadpans, “looks like I’m not going to die a virgin after all.”


	25. Crossroads

**_I can’t make that call_.**

**Of course you could, if you weren’t  
terrified.**

**_I am, and shouldn’t we all be?_ **

Emily Palermo, “Delineate”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 25**  
Crossroads

* * *

_Thursday, 2 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 81._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

After they put their clothes back on and make their way back to the campsite, Lucy shuffles over to the tent Amy shares with Andrea and tentatively scratches on the vinyl flap. Amy unzips it with a harsh metallic noise and looks at them with eyes rubbed raw and red from crying. Dale was the one who had found her and her sister on the road and brought them to the quarry, so his loss is hitting them hardest of all. “What?” she asks sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Lucy tells her softly, “but I need you to check Daryl’s wound. I think he ripped his stitches again.”

Amy sniffles and swallows thickly. “Fine,” she mutters. “Where’d you hide the first-aid kit? I needed to remove T-Dog’s sutures today, but I couldn’t find anything in your trailer.”

“Organized chaos,” Lucy deadpans. “Old habit.”

Amy nods and zips the flap of her tent up before she follows them to the solar-powered teardrop. Lucy moves some boxes around under her bed and pulls out some of the medical supplies they found in the big rig while Daryl folds himself into a seat by the tiny table and unbuttons his vest. Amy side-eyes the shirt he dropped in the laundry bag, the remnants of leaves tangled in Lucy’s mussed braid, the lingering whiff of sex she can smell on them.

“Please tell me you used protection,” she says.

Daryl flushes as heat crawls up the back of his neck. “I pulled out,” he says gruffly.

“Sometimes precum contains sperm,” Amy informs him with a sigh of exasperation, “pulling out doesn’t work.”

Daryl frowns at that. “Seriously?” he wants to know.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “but don’t worry. I’m on the pill. I’ve been taking it for hormonal migraines since I was sixteen. I stopped taking it when I was in college, but I kept refilling my prescription while I was still covered by my father’s insurance plan because I didn’t know if I would be covered by whatever insurance I got after I finished grad school. Which, on top of what I found in the pharmacy where I met Guillermo, is how I have a ten-year supply of birth control. I started taking it again two months ago,” she clarifies. “No offense to Lori, but getting pregnant in the zombie apocalypse is my worst nightmare.”

Amy nods again as she removes the stitches Daryl ripped. “Fair enough,” she says, “you think of everything. I should’ve known you’d have the sense to plan ahead.”

Lucy shrugs. “I am what I am,” she murmurs.

* * *

_Friday, 3 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 82._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

When the morning comes, they shroud Dale in the sheets from the Winnebago and bury him in the makeshift cemetery under one of the sugar maple trees. Rick gives the eulogy as Andrea puts wildflowers on his grave.

“Dale could get under your skin,” Rick says solemnly, “he sure got under mine, because he wasn’t afraid to say exactly what he thought, how he felt. That kind of honesty is rare and brave. Whenever I’d make a decision, I’d look at Dale and he’d be looking back at me with that look he had. We’ve all seen it one time or another. I couldn’t always read him, but he could read us. Dale saw people for who they were, and he knew things about us, who we really are…” he flicks his gaze to Lucy and clears his throat awkwardly as he looks away to avoid her caustic glare, “…in the end, he was talking about losing our humanity. Dale said our group was broken, and the best way to honor him is to unbreak it. Set aside our differences and pull together. Stop feeling sorry for ourselves and take control of our lives, our safety, our future.”

Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek hard at the insinuation, even though she doesn’t know if he’s talking about her or not. _I’m not feeling sorry for myself_ , she thinks, _I’m doing what I always do. I survive_.

“We’re not broken,” Rick says. “We’re going to prove him wrong. From now on, we’re going to do it his way. That is how we honor Dale.”

 _Famous last words_ , Lucy thinks viciously before she turns on her heels and hobbles away.

* * *

Amy spread the word overnight about Lucy’s stash of birth control, and most of the cis women in the group come to her before the funeral to ask if they can start taking contraceptives in case the rapists come because they don’t want to get pregnant if they survive their assault. Rick is planning to let Randall go without any further interrogation and without any intention of following him to see where his group is camped out. It takes a few weeks for the pill to kick in, so hopefully the rapists won’t come knocking before then.

Daryl spends the rest of the morning with Shane, Morgan, T-Dog, Jacqui and Andrea tracking down the steers that busted through the fence around their pasture and beating the stuffing out of the zombies that found them first. Rick, meanwhile, helps the others pack up before they move into the farmhouse. Shane drives the truck back to the campsite where the others are clustered around their not-so-fearless leader and gets out to hear whatever Rick has to say.

“It’ll be tight,” Rick points out, “two dozen people in one house.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Hershel says. “With the swamp hardening, the creek drying up…” he fizzles out because the creek drying up means their wells are going dry up along with it and they’ll have a harder time getting clean water during the winter.

“With fifty head of cattle on the property, we might as well be ringing the damn dinner bell,” Maggie adds tersely.

Hershel nods. “Maggie’s right,” he says, “we should’ve moved you in a while ago.”

Daryl glances out at the fields of grass before he goes to stand by Lucy and slips his arm around her waist so his hand curls over the soft hyperbola of her hip. Lucy sighs in a futile attempt to decompress and leans into the warmth of Daryl as she tries not to mention how terrible living with twenty-three other people in a four-bedroom house sounds. Although it’s only been about two weeks since they arrived at the farm, it feels like it’s been two years. Still, she has a feeling the worst is yet to come.

“Alright,” Rick says, “let’s move the vehicles near each of the doors, facing out towards the road. We’ll build a lookout at the windmill, another in the barn loft. That should give us sightlines to both sides of the property. Morgan, T-Dog, you take the perimeter around the house and keep track of everyone coming and going.”

Lucy sighs as Daryl goes to unpitch his tent and ride his bike closer to the house. _Those sightlines aren’t going to keep us safe_ , she thinks, _we need walls stronger than a wooden fence, pit traps and trenches, landmines in the fallow plots of land where things don’t grow and cows don’t graze. Two lookout posts isn’t going to cut it_.

“What about standing guard?” Morgan asks.

“Jacqui and Andrea have got it covered,” Rick tells him.

“Gotcha,” T-Dog says before they go back to packing up the campsite.

“What about patrols?” Gert wants to know.

“After we get this area locked down, Shane’ll assign patrol shifts while Daryl and I take Randall offsite and cut him loose,” Rick answers.

“We’re back to that now?” Shane asks incredulously.

“It was the right plan the first time around,” Rick tells him sharply. “It didn’t work because of poor execution.”

“That’s a slight understatement,” Shane points out.

“You don’t agree,” Rick says, “but this is what’s happening. Swallow it and move on.”

Lucy snorts. “You don’t want to kill Randall or his group,” she murmurs. “Dale being gutted is the perfect excuse. You get to lay all the blame for what happens next at the feet of a dead man,” she adjusts her glasses and forces herself to look him in the eyes. “You’re a fucking coward.”

“You want to take Daryl as your wingman,” Shane says as he tries and fails to stifle a grin at that, “be my guest.”

“Thank you,” Rick says through clenched teeth before he turns and walks away.

“You got it,” Shane mutters under his breath.

* * *

Lori corners Lucy as the librarian shuffles to her trailer and stops her with a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry for what happened to you in the past,” she says in a hushed voice, “but you need to stop lashing out at Rick for not agreeing with you.”

Lucy rolls her eyes and shrugs her hand off. “You think I want to keep doing this?” she asks the former housewife. “You think I want to lose sleep over the possibility of being raped again, of being forced to watch my best friends and the man I love get raped or killed and being powerless to stop that from happening? You think I want to keep throwing one of the worst things that has ever happened to me in your husband’s face?” she shakes her head slowly. “I don’t,” she clarifies, “but I’m scared and I’m not going to stop talking about it. I didn’t talk about my rape for almost two years after it happened. I promised myself that I would never keep quiet again.”

Lori swallows hard. “Rick is just doing what he thinks is right,” she points out.

“What he thinks is right is wrong for us,” Lucy retorts. “Now why don’t you go and find Carl instead of concern trolling me?”

Lori frowns and folds her arms tight across her chest. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks.

“Carl took one of Daryl’s guns and went off into the woods by himself yesterday,” Lucy informs her, “why do you think he was covered in mud? There was a zombie in the swamp and it must’ve followed him back to the farm. Carl isn’t taking the danger we’re in seriously because Rick isn’t taking it seriously, and neither are you. If you had kept better track of your son, Dale might still be alive.”

Lori shakes her head. “Now you’re just being cruel,” she tells her sharply.

“I may be cruel,” Lucy says as she shuffles up the steps into her trailer, “but I’m not wrong. Rick using Dale as his excuse to let Randall go free without using him to our advantage is a call that puts all of us at risk. If you can’t see that, you’re part of the problem.”

Lori flinches at the slam of the door and covers her mouth with one palm as a tremor of nausea lurches in her stomach. Rick has been worried about Lucy, but she has no idea if he’s worried about her because she’s clearly traumatized or because he sees her as a threat to his authority—even though she’s made it clear that she doesn’t want to lead.

 _There’s the rub_ , Dale had said to her before he died, _mankind’s been wiped out by monsters and we’re still our own worst enemy, still at each other’s throats_.

Lori swallows the bile under her tongue and shuts her eyes as she chokes on her unshed tears because she can’t ignore the horrible feeling that Rick can’t protect them, after all.

* * *

It’s late in the afternoon by the time Rick unrolls the map of the tri-county area to show Daryl the route he charted along the highway. “We’ll take him out to Carrollton,” he says, “hour there, hour back, give or take. We may lose the light, but we’ll be halfway home by then.”

Daryl nods brusquely. “This little pain in the ass’ll be a distant memory,” he mutters. “Good riddance.”

“Carol’s putting together some provisions for him,” Rick explains, “just enough to last a few days.”

Daryl sits on the edge of the porch railing and slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his fist closing around the radio that Lucy gave him. It’s an earpiece like the ones she and her friends use, since the set they scavenged from an electronics store came with six and they had two left over. Daryl hasn’t decided if he’s going to use it since he and Rick are going out of range for this field trip, but he likes knowing that he can get in touch with her one way or another.

“Hey,” Rick says quietly. “That thing you did last night…”

Daryl squints at him and exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils as the memory of shooting Dale between the eyes comes back to haunt him. “Ain’t no reason you should do all the heavy liftin’,” he says.

“So,” Rick says, “are you good with all of this? Lucy didn’t talk you into going with me just so you could have a chance to shoot Randall in the back, did she?”

Daryl snorts. “Nah,” he says. “I don’t see you and me tradin’ haymakers on the side of the road. Nobody’d win that fight, but if anythin’ happens t’ Lucy ’cause you made the wrong call again, I’ll kill you and you’ll never see it comin’.”

Rick narrows his eyes at the bowhunter and nods curtly because whatever happens next, Daryl is loyal to the woman he loves and he can’t help but respect that. “Fair enough,” he says.

Only he doesn’t get a chance to make the wrong call again because when a disgruntled T-Dog opens the door to the toolshed an hour later, Randall is gone. All that remains is a pair of bloodstained handcuffs and a vague sense of unease.


	26. Nobody’s Hero

**Life is dear to him yet,**  
**though he believes it his own fault he grieves,**  
**his own fault his old friends have turned against him**  
**like crows against an injured of their kind.**  
**There is no kindness here, no flint of mercy.**

Jane Hirshfield, “The Pear”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 26**  
Nobody’s Hero

* * *

_Friday, 3 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 82._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

All hell breaks loose after Carl admits to Shane that he took Daryl’s gun and he blames himself for what happened to Dale, but it needs to simmer for a while until it gets to the boiling point. Lori talks to Shane out by the windmill while Nico stops hammering at the lookout post to eavesdrop on their conversation and overhears the words that bring on the beginning of the end. Rick talks to Carl in the hayloft about what Shane told him while the words his best friend threw at him echo in his head: _Freeing that prisoner. More important to you than Carl_.

“No more kid stuff,” Rick says. “I wish you could have the childhood I had, but that’s not going to happen. People are going to die. I’m going die. Your mom…” he swallows thickly and stops before he starts because the idea of a world without Lori is unthinkable. “There’s no way you can ever be ready for it,” he says gravely. “I try to be, but I can’t. Best we can do now is avoid it as long as we can. Keep one step ahead.”

 _I don’t know who or what you’re trying to protect by keeping him alive_ , Lucy had said, _but it sure as hell isn’t us_.

Carl is who he was trying to protect, but that was just an excuse—like using Dale being gutted to justify taking a risk be setting the prisoner free was just an excuse. It’s time to stop making excuses and start making the hard choices.

Rick walks out of the barn with the weight of the world on his shoulders and catches sight of Lucy on the back porch, reading a paranormal romance novel with a sleeping Romy in the chair next to her while she guzzles a glass of strawberry lemonade through a neon green bendy straw. “You were right,” he says as soon as he gets within earshot of her, “I’m a coward.”

Lucy glances up from her book and squints at him before she puts her glasses back on. “Was that your idea of an apology?” she wants to know.

Rick ducks his head and nods. “I’m sorry,” he says to show her that he means it. “I shouldn’t have acted like you weren’t thinking clearly when you’re the reason we got out of the C. D. C. alive, the reason we have medical supplies and a way to reload our ammo, not to mention a cure for a virus that could kill everyone here except us. If you weren’t thinking clearly, we would all be dead or worse.”

Lucy shrugs. “I think you would’ve found your own way out of the C. D. C.,” she says, “but it wouldn’t have been as efficient as mine.”

Rick laughs in spite of himself. “Probably not,” he says. “Was that your way of accepting my apology?”

“I won’t accept your apology if you’re not going to use Randall to find out where his group is and give us a tactical advantage if nothing else,” Lucy informs him acerbically, “you tried to gaslight me because not taking me seriously was easier than acknowledging that you made a mistake. I don’t trust you and I’m not going to forgive you anytime soon.”

 _Errare humanum est_ , Lucy had said. _Sed perseverare diabolicum. It means that we all make mistakes, but choosing to make the same mistakes after we’ve been shown the error of our ways is evil. What we do in the aftermath of trauma and tragedy shows who we truly are—all you have to do is wait and see_. Apparently while he was waiting to see what Shane and Hershel would do in the aftermath of the shootout at the barn, Lucy was watching him to see if he was trustworthy and saw that he wasn’t.

“I can earn your trust,” Rick tells her, “just give me a chance.”

Only she doesn’t get a chance to respond to that, because T-Dog comes running from the toolshed. “Rick!” he shouts. “Randall’s gone!”

* * *

Lucy shuffles over to the toolshed with her corgi on her leash as the others rush out of the farmhouse in a swarm of panic that ricochets through the gloom of twilight. Cath shoots her a look that says Rick should’ve killed Randall when he had the chance without saying anything at all. Nico catches her eye and glances at the jeep, a nonverbal question: _should we stay or should we go now?_ Lucy slants her gaze to Kate before she shakes her head, a wordless answer: _not yet_. Daryl puts one hand on her shoulder and squints at her as she turns to look up into his eyes. Lucy sighs and tucks the warmth that unfurls in her chest at the intimate feeling of his hand on her away for later, because right now she needs the anxiety that fizzes up from the darkest part of her mind to keep her sharp.

“What’s wrong?” Maggie asks.

“Randall’s missing,” Glenn informs her.

“How long has he been gone?” Hershel wants to know.

“What the hell is going on?” Gert asks at the same time.

“Cuffs are still hooked,” Rick says as he emerges from the shed and shuts the door behind him, “he must’ve slipped them.”

“Wait,” Carol frowns as Sophia crouches to pick up Romy and bury her nose in the puppy’s fur, “is that possible?”

“It’s possible if you’ve got nothing to lose,” Andrea says.

“I thought the door was secured from the outside,” Jacqui cuts in.

“It was,” T-Dog says, “I unlocked the door and he was just…gone.”

Lucy snorts. _There’s no way he escaped_ , she thinks, _somebody must’ve let him out_.

“Rick!” Shane yells as he steps out of the forest with blood on his face. “Rick!”

Lucy groans internally because her instincts are telling her this isn’t going to end well. _Speak of the devil_ , she thinks, _and he shall appear_.

“What happened?” Lori asks.

“He’s armed!” Shane answers. “He’s got my gun!”

“Shane, are you okay?” Carl wants to know.

“I’m fine,” Shane tells him before he shifts his focus to Rick, “little bastard just snuck up on me. Clocked me in the face.”

“Alright,” Rick says, “Hershel, get everybody back in the house. Glenn, Daryl, Morgan, T-Dog, come with us.”

Daryl nocks an arrow and draws back his bowstring while Hershel tries to herd the others back up the stairs into the house. Lucy gives Romy’s leash to Kate before she goes to whisper something in his ear and he kisses her quick, like a shot in the dark.

“Andrea,” Shane looks pointedly at the pistol in her hands, “I’m gonna need that gun.”

“Wait,” Carol says as the blonde hands over her Glock, “this was the plan, wasn’t it, to just let him go?”

“No,” Rick snaps, “the plan was to cut him loose far away from here, not on our front step with a gun.”

Carol glares at him instead of flinching at the harsh edge in his voice before she takes Sophia by the hand and turns back toward the house.

“Lock all the doors and stay put!” Rick shouts as she shuts the door behind them.

“I saw him head up through the trees before I blacked out,” Shane rasps, “I’m not sure how long.”

“Randall couldn’t have gone far,” Rick points out, “he’s hobbled, exhausted.”

“Yeah,” Glenn says, “and armed.”

“So are we,” Morgan says.

“Daryl,” Rick says, “can you track him?”

“No,” Daryl mutters and frowns at the leaves and twigs scattered in the dirt because something feels off about this, “I don’t see nothin’.”

“Hey,” Shane interjects, “look, there ain’t no use in tracking him. I know he went that way. We need to pair up, spread out, just chase him down. That’s it.”

“Randall weighs a buck twenty-five soakin’ wet,” Daryl says and turns to narrow his eyes at Shane, “ya’ tryin’ to tell us he got the jump on ya’?”

“I’d say a rock pretty much evens those odds, wouldn’t you?” Shane retorts with a sliver of menace in his voice.

“Alright,” Rick snaps at them, “knock it off. Daryl, you and Glenn start heading up the right flank. Shane and I’ll take the left. Morgan and T-Dog, fan out in the middle. Remember,” he adds, “Randall’s not the only threat out there. Watch out for each other.”

Daryl nods gruffly and waits for Shane and Rick to walk off before he takes the radio that Lucy gave him out of his pocket and puts it into his ear. “You there, darlin’?” he asks quietly.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “get back to the farm as soon as you can. I’m not staying here another night.”

* * *

Lucy hobbles up the stairs with Cath, Kate, and Nico behind her. Gert and Gilda exchange a glance and follow them until they’re all crammed into the master bedroom.

“What’s the plan?” Gert asks.

Lucy doesn’t even bother with the pretense that she doesn’t have a plan. It’s time to stop pretending she’s less volatile, less awake. “There were only five people outside when Randall went missing,” she says, “me, Daryl, Rick, T-Dog, and Shane. I was reading. Rick and Daryl were loading up the Hyundai. T-Dog was standing guard at the toolshed, but he went to get Dale’s gun to give to Daryl and it took him a while to find it because it was in the RV and that piece of junk is a mess.”

“Shane let Randall go,” Nico deduces. There’s no emotion in her voice, nothing to indicate that she might’ve thought of Shane as anything more than just her rebound guy even though her friends know better. Nico had thought about a post-apocalyptic future with Shane for one brief shining moment, before she found out Lori was pregnant with his unborn child and that fantasy withered and died on the vine.

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “Shane wants to lure Rick out into the woods, kill him, and blame it on Randall,” she clarifies, “so we either have a leader who kept Randall around with the intention of setting him free in spite of the threat he posed to us, or a leader who killed Randall as part of a plot to murder his best friend and steal his wife.”

“What’s behind door number three?” Gilda wants to know.

Lucy is about to answer that question when Carol and Sophia open the door.

“I don’t think we’re safe here with Rick,” Carol says, “or Shane, for that matter. I trust you to keep us alive. If you’re leaving, we’re coming with you.”

* * *

Daryl taps his earpiece to turn it off because he doesn’t want to kill the battery and turns to squint at Glenn in the dark. “This is pointless,” he mutters before he asks, “you got a light?” Glenn nods and hands over a flashlight. Daryl shines it on the ground as Glenn stomps on a twig and breaks it with a crack that sets his teeth on edge. “Okay,” he says brusquely. “C’mon.”

“We’re just back to square one,” Glenn says as they retrace their steps until they’re back at the edge of the forest.

Daryl shrugs. “If you’re gonna do a thing,” he drawls, “you might as well do it right. Look,” he says and shines the flashlight on the ground. “There’s two sets of tracks right here. Shane must’ve followed him a lot longer than he said. There’s blood on this tree,” he glances down at the tracks and follows them to a path of scuffs in the dirt. “Looks like they’re walkin’ in tandem. There was a little dust-up right here.”

“What do you mean?” Glenn wants to know.

“I mean somethin’ went down here,” Daryl says, “and not in the fun way.”

“It’s getting weird,” Glenn mumbles.

When he scoops up the filthy strip of fabric they had used to gag Randall, something behind them snaps another twig and they both turn to see a fresh zombie shambling through the trees. Daryl whistles softly and tosses Glenn the flashlight before he circles around to get a better shot. Glenn shines the flashlight in its face and it yowls as Daryl aims his crossbow at the back of its head. Only he doesn’t get a chance to take the shot, because Glenn splits the skull of the zombified Randall with the hooked citrus peeler blade.

“Nice,” Daryl says and lowers his crossbow before he crouches next to the twice-dead corpse and taps his earpiece to turn it back on before he takes something out of the back pocket of Randall’s jeans. “Randall got his neck broke,” he tells Lucy, “you were right. Shane made all that shit up so he could have a chance to kill Rick.”

Glenn whirls to look at the archer over his shoulder, wide-eyed. “Oh, crap,” he whispers.

* * *

Lucy swallows hard as she hobbles down the stairs with Cath, Kate, Nico, Gilda, Gert, Carol, and Sophia bringing up the rear behind her. It hadn’t occurred to her that anyone besides her friends might want to follow her lead, but now she knows at least four other people do and that changes everything.

 _These people need to know who’s in charge here_ , Daryl had said, _what the rules are_.

 _There are no rules_ , Rick had said.

 _I’m scared_ , she’d told Daryl.

 _I don’t want to lead_ , she’d told Shane, _but I want to survive_.

 _I’m the last woman standing between our species and extinction_ , she’d told Hershel. _I’m the meek that shall inherit the earth_.

Lucy exhales with enough force to flap her lips in a futile attempt to decompress and shifts her weight onto her cane out of habit as she hobbles into the room where the rest of their people— _her_ people—are waiting. “Daryl and Glenn found Randall in the woods,” she informs them, “he was zombified, but he wasn’t bitten or scratched.”

“Shane broke his neck and left him to turn,” Nico adds in case anyone is slow on the uptake.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Lori asks sharply.

“We’re talking about your boyfriend taking Randall into the woods and killing him as part of his half-assed plan to murder your husband,” Kate answers.

“Which,” Nico says, “might have something to do with all the stuff you said to him out by the windmill today.”

“Oh God,” Lori whispers and covers her mouth with one hand before she sinks onto the couch next to Patricia.

Lucy glances around the room at Andrea, Amy, Jacqui, Duane, Maggie, Hershel, Beth, Jimmy, and Patricia as Gilda, Gert, Carol, and Sophia go to pack their bags. “I’m leaving,” she informs them all, “tonight. I’m taking my rig full of guns, my contributions to the food supply, at least two chickens, a dairy cow, a calf, and a heifer. I want to find someplace where I can set up a research lab and fortify better defenses than a wooden fence and two lookout posts, someplace where I can plant the seeds I’ve been collecting and synthesize a vaccine to cure the zombie virus.”

“Why can’t you do all of that here?” Hershel asks as Morgan and T-Dog walk in through the backdoor.

“I don’t feel safe here,” Lucy says in a voice that shakes with enough force to move the earth. “I don’t trust Rick to make the right choices for us, or Shane if he’s the last man standing.”

“There isn’t room for all of us to live here,” Cath points out, “even with Lucy and Daryl staying in her trailer it’s still not enough space for us and the supplies we’ll need to get through the winter.”

Lucy gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “I don’t want to lead,” she clarifies, “but I want to survive. Carol and Sophia are coming with us. Gert and Gilda are, too. I don’t know if Glenn is going to want to stay here with Maggie or not, but either way we know where to find you. I want to know if any of you will follow me.”

“I will,” Amy says, “you saved my life, and I believe in your research. I want to learn from Hershel, but I want to help you save the world a hell of a lot more.”

Andrea nods. “I go where my sister goes,” she says, “where you lead, we’ll follow.”

“Lucy, you gave me a reason to go on living when I thought all hope was lost,” Jacqui tells her softly. “I’m with you.”

T-Dog shrugs. “It wouldn’t be fair for that redneck to get all the girls,” he quips, “and I’d trust you over a cop any day. I’m coming too.”

“Okay,” Lucy says. “Hershel, we’re taking Otis’ truck and your livestock trailer. I promise to bring it back as soon as we’re settled elsewhere.”

“Keep the truck,” Hershel says, “we’ve got another. It belonged to Jimmy’s father.”

“Thank you,” Lucy tells him with a smile that doesn’t show her teeth.

Hershel nods. “It’s the least I can do,” he murmurs and flicks his gaze to Beth, “you’re the reason my little girl is still breathing. Just promise me you’ll come visit and bring your vaccine with you.”

“I promise,” Lucy says, like she means it.

“There’s a portable chicken coop in the basement,” Maggie says. “I’ll go and get it for you.”

“Thank you,” Lucy echoes.

Cath takes Romy and Harley outside to pee before she puts the dogs in the back of the jeep. Nico and Kate go hitch the bulky twenty-four-by-seven-foot livestock trailer left behind by the people that Hershel was grazing the cattle for pre-apocalypse to the big rig before he and Beth help them coax a dairy cow, a heifer, and a calf inside. There’s enough straw and feed to last through the winter because Lucy asked Hershel if she could do this beforehand, although she hadn’t anticipated that it would happen sooner rather than later.

T-Dog, Jacqui, Carol, and Sophia load up the church van with everything they might need. Maggie collects two hens, a rooster, and a few of the baby chicks whose mother was eaten by the zombies in the barn. While the farmer’s daughter is finagling the chickens into the back of the truck, a gunshot rings out.

Lori slants her gaze to Lucy. “What about Rick?” she asks. “How do you plan to tell him that you’re leaving and taking more than half of our people with you?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy says. “I’ll figure that out if and when he comes back alive.”


	27. Shapes of Things

**We could not escape, and all we dreamed of was death.**  
**A plague. A warning sign. Sporadic shaking.**  
**Moons out of orbit. Water in the basements. Earthquakes along state lines.**  
**Our bones grew cold while we slept. There was no distraction.**  
**Everyone threatening a different weapon. Nature turned on us, furious.**

**We had a bad case of burnout. Then no sleep at all.**  
**We tried to hold together. We prayed. We lit candles. We huddled for warmth.**  
**We marshaled resources. We held hands. We looked to the animals.**  
**Someone told me to pull it together. I was busy writing down the stories.**  
**Even with the barns burning, the last glow on the horizon, I could not stop taking notes.**

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Notes from Before the Apocalypse”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 27**  
Shapes of Things

* * *

_Saturday, 4 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 83._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_The Greene Farm._

* * *

After the supplies are loaded into the convoy that consists of the big rig, the blue truck, the church van, Nico’s red Jeep Cherokee, and a Honda Civic Gilda had Gert boost from the traffic snarl on the highway when they went out to siphon more gas a few days earlier, Daryl and Glenn return to the farmhouse and bring the ominous chill that hangs in the night air home to roost. Lori narrows her eyes as Daryl extracts something from the pocket of his jeans and hands it over to Lucy. “What is that?” she asks.

“It’s a voice-activated recording device with a USB port,” Lucy informs her. “I had Daryl put this in Randall’s pocket two days ago. I figured he would be too disoriented in the aftermath of being impaled, undergoing hours of surgery with no anesthetic, and being held prisoner for a week and a half in a dark shed with no painkillers to notice it. I was right, and now I have a record of what happened to him out in the woods.”

“We’re gonna have to wait to find out,” Andrea says as she goes to shut the front door and catches sight of the massive horde of zombies shambling through the dark fields.

“Patricia,” Hershel says as everyone crowds onto the back porch, “kill the lights.”

“Maybe they’re just passing by,” Glenn whispers, “like the horde on the highway.”

“Should we just go back inside?” Gilda asks.

Daryl shakes his head slowly. “Not unless there’s a tunnel downstairs we don’t know about,” he drawls, “horde that size’ll tear the house down.”

“I want everybody to load as many supplies as you can into the cars,” Lucy says, “stay in groups of two or more. Nobody goes anywhere alone. Let’s all meet outside in fifteen minutes. If and when anybody gets separated from the pack, we’ll regroup two miles up the road at the traffic snarl. Let’s go!”

Lori careens down the stairs with a frantic look in her eyes as Andrea returns with the sheriff’s bag of guns from the RV and everybody locks and loads. “Carl’s gone,” she whispers urgently. “I can’t find him anywhere.”

“Maybe he’s hiding,” Morgan tries to reassure her.

“I’m not leaving without my boy!” Lori shrills, her voice pitching higher in distress.

“We’re not,” Carol says firmly. “We’re going to look again. We’re going to find him.”

Lori and Carol search the house high and low for Carl while the others load supplies into the cars parked outside: Maggie’s Mercury Sable, Nico’s jeep, T-Dog’s church van, Hershel’s Silverado, Gert’s Honda Civic, Otis’ truck, and Shane’s Hyundai. Lucy snatches up a pair of binoculars that belonged to Dale and looks out into the night at the zombies as they swarm the barn.

“What’s goin’ on?” Daryl asks her.

Lucy turns to look at him over her shoulder and lowers the binoculars as the barn bursts into flame before their eyes. “I know where Carl is,” she deadpans, “Rick started a fire and they climbed up into the hayloft.”

Daryl nods and jumps over the porch rail to where his bike is waiting. “Let’s go get ’em,” he says.

Lucy stops to fold her cane up into her backpack and take a weapon Nico offers to her before she hobbles down the stairs and gets on the back of his bike. Maggie, Glenn, Gert, and Gilda all pile inside the Hyundai while Carol, Sophia, Duane, and Morgan take the Civic; Carol drives with her hands clenched white-knuckled around the wheel so Morgan can aim his rifle out the passenger side window and shoot at the zombies. T-Dog drives the truck that belonged to the dearly departed Fischers with Andrea and Cath in the back while Amy waits at the house in the truck with the chickens, Jacqui waits in the church van, Nico waits in the jeep hitched to the trailer, and Kate waits in the rig for Lucy to give her the getaway signal.

Daryl cuts the engine and puts his feet on the ground to keep his bike upright in between his legs. Lucy slips off the back of his bike, pulls a live grenade out of her backpack, and loads it into the shotgun Nico modified for her. Daryl glances at her sidelong. “What the hell is that?” he asks.

“Nico followed instructions from the _Anarchist Cookbook_ to make me a grenade launcher,” Lucy informs him before she puts her earplugs in and props her weapon on the fence in front of them to avoid most of the kickback from bracing the shot against her shoulder.

Daryl whistles long and low as she launches the grenade into the field and blows a slew of zombies back to hell where they belong. “C’mon!” he shouts as she uses the grenades they found at the C. D. C. to thin the herd. Lucy ducks her head in a nod before she moves to sit behind him on the back of his bike again and wraps an arm tight around his waist as they ride over to the Winnebago. “Yo!” the archer shouts at Jimmy over the rev of the engine and the ricochet of gunfire, “it was Rick who started the fire. Maybe he and Carl are tryin’ t’ get out the back! Why don’t ya’ circle around?”

Jimmy nods so fast his cowboy hat almost falls off. “Got it!” he shouts back.

Rick doesn’t notice the zombies are trying to get Carl instead of him as they climb down the ladder on the back of the RV and blood splatters on the windshield as the horde eats Jimmy alive. Lori flees the house with a frazzled Beth and Patricia, who isn’t fast enough to outrun a zombie fresh enough to grab her shoulder and sink its teeth into her neck to rip her throat out. Beth tries to hold onto her, but none of the zombies who stop to gnaw on Patricia make a move to take a bite out of her.

Hershel stubbornly tries to hold the front line behind the house as Lori screams at him to run before she turns to flee and pulls a wailing Beth away from Patricia’s dead body and drags her to the truck with T-Dog in the driver’s seat as Andrea makes a run for the guns and ammo they left in the sheriff’s bag on the porch. Cath jumps out of the back of the truck and goes after her. It’s the last time Lori will ever see either of them alive.

Rick shoots a zombie that comes up behind Hershel and yells at Carl to get in backseat of the Silverado before they all flee the farm together. Cath and Andrea run into the forest with the guns while she tries and fails to get through to her friends on the radio. Lucy rides with Daryl onto the backroad they designated as part of her plan to get the hell out of dodge, and she shuts her eyes as the fire rages in their rearview mirror and they do not go gently into the night.

* * *

_Saturday, 4 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 83._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_Crook Road._

* * *

Daryl and Lucy meet up with Nico and Kate a few miles down the backroad. Lucy shuffles into her trailer to plug the recording device into her laptop and Nico stands by the door to keep watch as they listen to what it has to say.

There’s a lot of weird ambient noise before Shane starts talking. “ _I get it_ ,” he whispers from beyond the grave. “ _I’m the last face you probably wanna see, huh? Listen, I’m gonna take you up out of here. Okay? I’m gonna get this off you so you can breathe_ …” the gag rustles, the sound diluted by the denim of the pocket the device was in, “… _but I want you to keep quiet. Now you listen good, do you hear me? Okay, don’t do nothin’ stupid. Hey_ ,” a muffled smack that sounds more like a warning than anything else, “ _your group, you know where they’re at?_ ”

“ _No_ ,” Randall bleats, “ _I don’t. I really_ —”

Shane hauls him to his feet with a crackle of sound. “ _Get your little ass up here_ ,” he hisses. “ _Now, I’m the only shot you’ve got at getting out of these woods alive, you hear me? Now start talking, boy: where are they at?_ ”

“ _We had a camp set up off the highway_ ,” Randall tells him, “ _about five miles up the road from here. Who knows if they’re still there?_ ”

Lucy glances at Daryl, who nods—as soon as they hear the rest of the recording, they’re going to find that campsite.

“ _So you gonna take me to ’em?_ ” Shane asks.

“ _Why?_ ” Randall wants to know.

“ _Look_ ,” Shane says, “ _man, I—I’m just—I’m done with this group, man…they’re doomed and I want no part of it. That’s all_.”

“ _So you’re not gonna kill me?_ ” Randall asks.

“ _C’mon, man_ ,” Shane scoffs, “ _if I was, you’d be dead_.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Randall whines as Shane pushes him and his foot snags on something that makes him stumble audibly. “ _You ain’t gotta be so rough. We’re on the same side now. You’re gonna like it with us. Gets a little crazy sometimes, but it’s a tough bunch of guys. You’ll fit in good_.”

“ _Less talking_ ,” Shane grumbles. “ _More walking_.”

“ _I run my mouth when I’m nervous_ ,” Randall says. “ _I can’t help it. I’ve got a lot going on, y’know?_ ”

“ _Well_ ,” Shane mutters, “ _it ain’t all about you_.”

“ _I-I ain’t saying it’s all about me_ ,” Randall stutters, “ _just trying to_ —”

Only he never gets a chance to finish that sentence, because Shane breaks his neck. Lucy bites down on the inside of her cheek as the snap fades into a bloom of static. “I knew it,” she mumbles, “I knew Randall was lying about having women and children in his group.”

Daryl slowly drags one rough hand along the curve of her spine as she turns her laptop off. “How about we go hunt down them rapists?” he murmurs.

Lucy smiles at him, sweet and vicious. “I thought you’d never ask,” she says.

* * *

_Sunday, 5 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 84._  
_Senoia, GA;_  
_3481 GA-85._

* * *

When the morning comes, they regroup at the traffic snarl on the highway. Hershel, Rick, and Carl arrive hours before dawn and wait for everyone else to show up. Jacqui comes next, driving the church van with Amy in the truck behind her and the Civic with Carol, Sophia, Duane, and Morgan bringing up the rear. Then, as the sun rises into the sky, Daryl grinds his bike to a halt in front of the Silverado with the jeep, the big rig, the Hyundai, and Lori in another truck all driving up behind him. Maggie runs to throw her arms around her father and they untangle only so she and Hershel can hug Beth tight. Lori crouches to pull Carl into her arms and Rick kneels with their son in between them to bury his face in her neck. After everyone else emerges from the convoy of vehicles, Lucy sucks in a sharp breath and forces herself not to cry because Cath didn’t make it.

“Where’d you find everyone?” Rick wants to know.

Daryl cuts the engine of his bike and moves to put an arm around Lucy, who droops against his side she wants to fall apart even though she knows that isn’t an option. “Those guys’ tail lights were zigzaggin’ all over the road,” he says and grins at Glenn. “I figured they had t’ be Asian, drivin’ like that.”

Gert arches one eyebrow at the redneck like a challenge. “You know Lucy is a quarter Japanese, right?” she asks.

Daryl glances at Lucy, who nods. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “watashi no jitsubo wa haafu desu. I have a picture of her somewhere if you don’t believe me. Also, watashi wa nihongo ga perapera da.”

“Just so you don’t get lost in translation, Katniss,” says Nico, “she said ‘my biological mother was biracial. Also, I’m fluent in Japanese.’ We both are. Only my father was half Japanese, not my mother.”

“Lucy’s a shit driver,” Daryl points out petulantly.

“Yeah,” Lucy acknowledges, “but that’s because I’ve lost all mobility in one of my wrists, not because one of my grandparents wasn’t white. I love you, but you’ve got to cut that racist shit out.”

Daryl nods brusquely. “I love you, too,” he tells her.

Lori ignores them and turns to look at Rick. “Shane?” she asks him and her face pales as her husband shakes his head.

Amy folds her arms loosely across her chest. “Andrea?” she asks quietly as dread settles in her stomach in anticipation of the answer.

“I’m sorry,” T-Dog answers her, “we saw her go down.”

Amy swallows hard and ducks so her long blonde hair falls in front of her face. Jacqui puts an arm around her shoulders as she shakes with the effort it takes not to burst into tears.

“Patricia?” Hershel asks.

Beth shakes her head. “No,” she whispers, “they got her, took her right in front of me. I was…I was holding onto her, Daddy, but she just…” she sniffles before she squares her shoulders in spite of the tears in her eyes. “What about Jimmy?” she wants to know, “did you see Jimmy?”

“Jimmy was in the RV,” Rick says. “It got overrun.”

“What about Cath?” Lucy asks softly.

“I saw her,” Lori says, “but…”

Daryl nuzzles her hair. “I’m gonna go back,” he whispers to her.

“No,” Rick says flatly.

Daryl narrows his eyes at the former sheriff. “We can’t just leave ’em,” he snarls.

“We don’t even know if they’re still at the farm,” Lori points out.

“I can’t get through to Cath on the radio,” Lucy mumbles, “either she’s out of range or she’s dead.”

“There’s no way to find either of them even if they made it out alive,” Rick says as a zombie in a rotting argyle sweater comes shuffling up from behind them. “We’ve gotta keep moving. There’ve been dead things crawling all over here.”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and gets his crossbow from the back of his bike. “Stay off the highway,” he says before he shoots the zombie in the head and goes to fetch his arrow, “the bigger the road, the more assholes like this one.”

“There’s a hotel in Peachtree City,” Lucy says, “the Hampton Inn. It’s close to a Best Buy so tomorrow we can find enough radio earpieces for everyone, in case we ever get separated again. There’s also a Walmart a few blocks away where we can scavenge more food.”

Rick nods. “Sounds like a plan,” he says.

Lucy turns and glares at him so harshly that he takes an instinctual step away from her. “Let me make one thing abundantly clear,” she snaps at him, “I didn’t pull the location of that hotel out of my ass. I made a contingency plan a week and a half ago because I wanted to get the hell away from you. Cath is gone because I gave you the benefit of the doubt instead of trusting my instincts. I’m not doing that anymore.”

Rick glares right back at her because it didn’t go unnoticed by him that all of the supplies were loaded into the getaway cars and he has a hunch that was because of her. “So you think you’re in charge now,” he snaps back, “is that it?”

“You’re the one who wanted me to stop feeling sorry for myself and take control of my life,” Lucy retorts. “You should’ve been more careful what you wished for.”


	28. Heresy

**Gluttony is a sin advertised on the**  
**thighs of**  
**girls who do not**  
**need to slither beneath the brush.**  
**Who wear their skin**  
**like it’s still got spare thread from sitting**  
**on the throne at the top of the food chain**  
**clinging to the inner corners of their knees.**  
**Soft, like worthiness.**

Dorothy McGinnis, “In Which I Am the Ouroboros”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 28**  
Heresy

* * *

_Sunday, 5 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 84._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_The Hampton Inn._

* * *

After they leave the horde of zombies that ravaged the farm in their dust, they arrive at the Hampton Inn: a beige two-story building with a flat stretch of a roof, a gabled entryway in the front, and a kidney-shaped pool in the back. It takes over an hour for them to clear out all the corpses inside, dead and undead; they pile them in one corner of the parking lot in the shade of the trees surrounding the hotel and leave them to rot.

Lucy flops into an armchair against the wall across from the reception desk and muffles a raucous yawn in the hollow of one palm as the others crowd inside. “There are sixty-one rooms for sleeping,” she informs everyone, “plus the kitchen, the conference room, and the gym. I call one of the accessible rooms with a bathtub. Nico, Kate, go up to the roof with fuel and find the generator. I want hot water and flushable toilets for when we wake up.”

After that, any conversations people were having amongst themselves subside into hustle and bustle as everyone goes to pick out a room and bring their things in from the cars outside. There are enough rooms for everyone to sleep alone, but they pair up anyway because sleeping alone at the end of the world isn’t safe. Daryl and Lucy take a single room. Nico and Kate, Carol and Sophia, Gert and Gilda, Morgan and Duane, T-Dog and Jacqui, Hershel and Beth, and Rick, Lori, and Carl all take rooms with double beds. Amy is the odd woman out until Gert unabashedly invites her into the room she plans on sharing with her sister, because Gilda has been crushing on the fledgling surgeon and she likes flustering her younger siblings. Glenn and Maggie take a single room across the hall from them.

Lucy wants nothing more in that moment than a nap followed by a long soak with Daryl in the bathtub that comes with their room and possibly an orgasm or three. Unfortunately, they’re not stranded on the road but they’re not settled here either. Rick keeps looking at her with a sharp edge in the slant of his gaze and tension in the line of his shoulders, his body coiled tight like a trap about to spring.

“What’s the rest of the plan?” Gert asks as soon as everyone has reassembled in the lobby. “We didn’t get a chance to hear it before Rick burned us out of the farm.”

Lucy has to stifle another yawn before she answers. “I want to find as many big rigs as possible,” she says. “Nico is going to wire the trailers with electrical outlets that run on solar energy. I want to fill one with refrigerators, one with washers and dryers, one with clothes and blankets for winter, one with tech like my servers and an ARDF system to keep track of everyone with a radio, one with medical supplies and equipment, one with extra fuel, one with books, and at least one with nonperishable food.”

“I’m going to attach tanks to the washing machines,” Nico clarifies, “so they won’t have to draw water from pipes.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods. “Carol,” she says, “you could have a new Maytag.”

“I do miss my Maytag,” Carol says wistfully.

Daryl smiles at that, a twist of his mouth that doesn’t show his teeth. “I worked as a mechanic for a while,” he adds. “I’m gonna find parts and convert the engines t’ run on somethin’ other than fossil fuel. Straight vegetable oil works fine if you’ve got a single tank system, but I can make biodiesel too. Takes less conversion on the mechanic side of things, but it’s still a process.”

“Also,” says Lucy, “we could attach multiple trailers to one semi and live in them, get comfy mattresses instead of sleeping bags and cots. Until we find someplace where we can settle permanently, we can stay mobile and scavenge as many supplies as possible. There shouldn’t be a shortage of anything that isn’t perishable even if you take other survivors and nonhuman scavengers into consideration, because this country was sustaining hundreds of millions of people until the world went to hell in a handbasket.”

“Why can’t we stay here?” Lori asks. “There’s enough room—”

“It’s not defensible,” Kate answers. “It’s also urban.”

Hershel nods. “We need to find a place with enough land to start growing our own food,” he murmurs.

“It also needs to have preexisting defenses,” Lucy adds, “a fence that we can dig trenches and pit traps around at the very least.”

“We can set up wooden spikes to skewer the zombies so they can’t get anywhere near us,” Morgan suggests.

“I like the way you think,” Lucy tells him with a grin.

Rick clears his throat awkwardly. “We’ve all been through hell and worse,” he says, “but at least we found each other. I wasn’t sure, I really wasn’t, but we did. We’re together,” he stresses that point and slants his gaze to Lucy. “We keep it that way. There’s gotta be a place not just where we hole up, but that we fortify, hunker down, pull ourselves together, build a life for each other. I know it’s out there. We just have to find it. Until then, we can do what Lucy said and concentrate on staying mobile.”

“There are zombies everywhere,” Glenn mutters, “they’re migrating or something.”

“Yeah,” Daryl says, “but they ain’t gonna attack Lucy, or Rick.”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound as everyone turns to look at her skeptically, “they can smell the immunity somehow and they’ve gotten smart enough not to fuck with us because even trace amounts of our blood can kill them.”

“Okay,” Maggie says tersely, “but even if we do find a place like what you’re talking about and we think it’s safe, we can never be sure for how long. I mean, look what happened with our farm. We fooled ourselves into thinking it was safe.”

“We won’t make that mistake again,” Hershel says firmly.

“What if the zombies come through here?” Beth asks, “or another group like Randall’s?”

“Randall’s group won’t be a problem,” Lucy informs her. “I had Daryl put a listening device on Randall and we heard the recording last night. Shane took him into the woods and broke his neck, but first he got Randall to tell him that his group was camped out five miles up the highway from the farm. Daryl and I went to see if his thirty men were still out there, but their camp was overrun by stragglers from the horde that we saw.”

Daryl hums, a soft _mmm-hmm_ that starts low in his throat. “Y’all know I found Randall in the woods last night,” he adds, “he’d turned, but he wasn’t bit.”

Lori turns to look at her husband. “Rick,” she rasps. “What the hell happened?”

Daryl squints at the former sheriff. “Shane killed Randall,” he observes, “just like he always wanted to, like you should’ve before all this went down.”

“I did what I thought was right!” Rick snaps and bites down around the consonant. “I’m keeping this group together. Alive. I’ve been doing that all along, no matter what. I didn’t ask for this. I killed my best friend for you people, for Christ’s sake!”

Lori flinches at that, even though she had known deep down that Shane wasn’t killed by the horde swarming the farm the night before.

“You saw what he was like,” Rick says. “How he pushed me. How he compromised us. How he threatened us. Shane staged the whole Randall thing, let me out to put a bullet in my back. I killed him because he gave me no choice. Shane was my best friend, but he came after me…” he swallows thickly before he adds, “…my hands are clean.”

Amy glares at him. “You should’ve left Randall to bleed out in that alley,” she tells him sharply, “my sister is dead because of you, so don’t you dare say your hands are clean, you son of a bitch. You say Shane compromised us, he threatened us, but that wasn’t just him. It was you, too.”

“We’re not safe with you,” Carol adds. “We deserve better.”

“Fine,” says Rick, “maybe you people are better off without me. I say there’s a place for us, but maybe it’s just another pipedream, maybe I’m fooling myself again. Why don’t you go and find out for yourselves? Send me a postcard.” At that, he shakes his head and flails one hand at the entrance behind them. “Go ahead,” he sneers, “there’s the door. You think you can do better? Let’s see how far you get.”

“We didn’t get this far ’cause of you,” Daryl snarls at him. “We got this far ’cause of Lucy.”

Glenn nods. “We were starving on the road to the C. D. C. before she went and found us food,” he says. “Why do you think I took a group on a run into the city, even though I knew it might get us all killed? We never had enough to eat when it was just me running supplies.”

“While we were all taking hot showers and getting drunk,” T-Dog says, “Lucy scavenged the C. D. C. for supplies and got the override codes to the front door.”

“Sophia would’ve died out there in the forest if Lucy hadn’t gone after her,” Carol says, “she didn’t leave her all alone like you did.”

“Lucy didn’t waste that whole week we were waiting for Randall to get back on his feet,” Maggie adds, “she went out to the highway and brought home a rig full of medical supplies, she planned a run to Home Depot and we siphoned more gas from the cars in the parking lot, and sent Daryl and Nico to find more guns while Kate and Glenn got us supplies to reload our ammo.”

Hershel nods. “Lucy is also the reason we still have all of those supplies,” he says, “including cows and chickens from my farm to give us milk and eggs and butter and cream and cheese.”

“You were planning to leave,” Rick deduces and shoots Lucy a virulent look of accusation. “You were going to drive off in the middle of the night with our supplies and leave the people who stayed high and dry.”

Lucy snorts. “When my friends and I came to the quarry,” she says, “Shane was already the de facto leader and we fell in line because we were all used to able-bodied white men being at the top of the food chain. I was too busy worrying about my family back in Seattle and trying to save as much useful data as I could before the internet crashed to question his authority, but then you showed up. Shane defaulted to letting you call the shots because you were his commanding officer pre-apocalypse, and you made everything worse. Those supplies I found and scavenged with my friends and my boyfriend are mine. I shared with the group, but I didn’t have to. I’m a better survivor than you. There’s no question about that. Shane wouldn’t have been able to use Randall to lure you to your death if you’d just killed him when you had the chance.”

“So you’re saying you should lead because I made a mistake,” Rick says, “is that it?”

Lucy shakes her head slowly. “I’m saying we should give everyone a choice,” she clarifies as she pulls her listography notebook out of her pocket and tears out twenty pages. “Let’s take a vote. Rick leads, I lead, nobody leads,” she passes the blank pieces of paper around to everyone in the lobby, “true democracy makes a comeback from where we left it back in the Hellenic period now that electoral votes aren’t a thing anymore. I don’t give a crap. I just think we all deserve to have a say in who calls the shots, for better or worse.”

Nico passes the tiny Sharpie that she keeps clipped on her key fob around the assemblage of people so they can write their votes down. Glenn collects them in Dale’s fishing hat before he counts them.

It’s almost unanimous: two votes for Rick, seventeen for Lucy, and Lucy herself abstaining.

“I guess the people have spoken,” Rick says as some of the palpable tension slumps out of his shoulders.

“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” Lucy deadpans.

* * *

Lucy breaks down as soon as she shuffles into the suite she chose to sleep in and shuts the door behind her, tears stinging her eyes as her trembling fingers clutch at the handle of her cane and she lets the weight of her sorrow bring her to her knees. It’s the first time she’s cried since the world ended—she didn’t cry when Vera died, she kept herself busy the day the internet crashed even though any hope she ever had that she might hear back from her family in Seattle was lost, she held her tears in that night at the nursing home because she didn’t want to fall apart—so the sobs rip through her whole body as Daryl crouches on the floor to wrap himself around her from behind and hold her.

“S’okay,” he tells her softly, “you’re okay. I gotcha. C’mon.”

Lucy clings to his forearm and lets him lift her up onto her feet to walk her over to a bed that has dust all over the duvet, but it doesn’t smell like death so it’s good enough for them. Daryl nuzzles her hair and peels back the blankets. Lucy coughs as the dust flies around them and starts to laugh through her tears as she unceremoniously strips out of her dirty clothes.

Daryl snorts and tries not to take her undressing the wrong way because he knows she probably doesn’t want to have sex right now, not when her best friend just kicked the bucket and they’re both exhausted from being up all night running for their damn lives. Still, he can’t help but lick the salt of her tears from her plump cheeks and kiss her gently.

Lucy breaks the kiss to extract two bowls from her backpack and a Ziploc sandwich bag full of kibble. Daryl watches her shuffle over to the kitchen area in her bra and underwear to put food and water on the floor for Romy, who boofs happily before she eats. “I have a plan,” she informs him, “we take a nap, then we take a hot bath together, and I can try not to have a panic attack because I was just elected to a leadership position I never wanted by rule of the people.”

Daryl strips out of his shirt and vest before he drops his pants and gets in bed with a loud yawn that he doesn’t bother to stifle. “I said ya’ should lead,” he murmurs, “way back when ya’ were lost in them woods. I fuckin’ called that shit.”

Lucy cackles as she crawls into bed with him, puts her glasses on the bedside table, unhooks the clasp of her bra and drops it onto the floor to keep his jeans company. “Okay,” she says and ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ as she nuzzles the sparse hair on his chest, “like I said to Rick: be careful what you wish for.”

* * *

After she wakes up from her long nap, Lucy shuffles into the laundry room to start a load before she goes to take her bath and finds Lori waiting for a load to dry. “I recognized your handwriting from the lists we all made for Glenn back at the quarry,” she mumbles as she separates her laundry into two machines. “You voted for me. Why?”

Lori shrugs. “You heard Rick,” she says, “he never wanted this. I watched my husband try and fail to live up to the expectations these people had of him, and he was doing it because he thought he had to but it was taking a toll on him. You’re a better survivor than he is. I see that now, and I think you’ll do right by us even though I know you never wanted this either. What’s that saying, about greatness?”

“It’s ‘be not afraid of greatness,’” Lucy quotes, “‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’ It’s Shakespeare. _Twelfth Night_ , Act Two, Scene Five.”

Lori smiles at her and nods, a sharp descent of her chin. “Yeah,” she says, “that’s the one.”

Lucy cocks her head owlishly and smiles back. _O brave new world_ , she thinks, _that has such people in ’t_.


	29. Available Light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warning** : I would apologize for this chapter being 50% smut, but I did a thing on Tumblr a while back that said my life as a fic on AO3 would be tagged as Library Bondage so I had to write library sex into a story at some point and here we are. I’m a nerd and I’m not even sorry. Beware.
> 
>  **Additional Tags** : Rough Kissing, Neck Kissing, Biting, Foreplay, Breastplay, Nipple Play, Nipple Licking, Submission, Vaginal Sex, Library Sex.

**It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,**  
**it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,**  
**how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days**  
**were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple**  
**to slice into pieces.**  
**Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means**  
**we’re inconsolable.**  
**Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.**  
**These, our bodies, possessed by light.**  
**Tell me we’ll never get used to it.**

Richard Siken, “Scheherazade”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 29**  
Available Light

* * *

_Thursday, 16 September 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 95._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_The Hampton Inn._

* * *

It sinks in slowly, the persistent grief over losing Cath despite her best efforts. Lucy can’t keep track of how many times she turns around to look at her best friend, only to remember that she’s gone. It’s like she’s haunted.

While the others go out in teams of two to salvage as many big rigs as they can find, Nico has been working on building solar panels and designing a system to wire the trailers with electrical outlets so they can plug in different kinds of appliances. It’s not what she thought she would be using her engineering degree for, but she’s not complaining.

Kate celebrates her twenty-eighth birthday on the same day Nico wires the first rig with solar panels on the ceiling and lets it sit in the parking lot to soak up the sun and charge. Lucy gives her a copy of _Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood_ and a console to play the game on.

“I didn’t know enough about gaming to deduce whether you would want an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3,” Lucy informs her, “so I got both.”

Kate grins at her. “Sweet.”

Nico fistpumps before she turns back to her solar panels. “Yes!” she whoops under her breath.

Lucy snickers and shuffles away to find Amy because she wants to start drawing blood from everyone who’s infected once a month to see if the virus mutates again. It’s within the realm of possibility, since the airborne strain of the retrovirus wiped out approximately 99.99% of the human population on the planet by her latest estimate.

When she hobbles up the stairs, she catches sight of Amy pinning Gilda up against the door to their room and kissing her desperately with one hand on her face while the other tangles in her hair.

Lucy clears her throat and gives them a shit-eating grin. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says in a totally unapologetic tone. “I just had an idea to run by you for our research, but I can do that later. Have fun eating out.”

“Oh my god,” Amy whispers and groans at the innuendo as Gilda squeals with mortified laughter and buries her face in her neck.

* * *

_Friday, 1 October 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 111._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_201 Willowbend Road._

* * *

When he goes out on a run to siphon gas for the generator from abandoned cars, Daryl finds a library a mile away from the inn off Highway 54 and taps his earpiece to get in touch with Lucy back at the hotel. “Hey,” he says gruffly, “can ya’ bring one of the empty rigs t’ where I’m at? I got a surprise for ya’.”

“Sure,” Lucy says before she turns her earpiece off.

Nico pinpoints his location using the radio direction finder in the rig she wired to contain Lucy’s servers and run the rendering of the digital map that she made on the road. Lucy drives the empty semi-trailer truck slowly because she has never driven a vehicle so high off the ground and proceeding with caution seems like the best way to avoid what anxiety tells her is certain death.

 _Massive hordes of the undead? No problem_ , Lucy thinks, _driving a semi? Panic-inducing, because I’m ridiculous_.

Worse, she knows that Daryl took the truck that had once belonged to Otis on this run. It’s a stick-shift, so she can’t make Daryl take the big rig back to the hotel because she couldn’t drive the truck if she wanted to.

 _Mental note: have Daryl show me how to drive stick later_ , Lucy thinks, _it can’t be harder than giving a handjob. Pun intended_.

Daryl is leaning up against the door of the truck with an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a lighter in his hand.

Lucy emerges from the rig and eyes him from behind her glasses. “I won’t kiss you if you smoke that,” she informs him matter-of-factly, “cigarette smoke is carcinogenic as hell and it tastes and smells gross too.”

Daryl shoves the lighter back in the pocket of his jeans, tucks the cigarette behind one ear, and pops a piece of a cinnamon stick in his mouth instead. “Better?” he asks.

Lucy hobbles over and goes on tiptoe to kiss the corner of his mouth. “Yup,” she says and pops the _p_ sound, “now where’s my surprise?”

Daryl puts one arm around her waist and turns to point the building out to her. “I remember ya’ said ya’ wanted a rig full of books,” he tells her softly, “here’s your chance.”

“Oh,” Lucy whispers reverently and turns to give him a smile so luminous that his mouth goes dry and his heart stutters and stops for a fraction of a second, “you found me a library.”

“Wasn’t too hard,” Daryl mutters, “it’s only a mile out—”

Only he doesn’t get a chance to finish that sentence, because Lucy hooks an arm around his neck and slants her mouth up against his to kiss him so sweetly that something aches deep in his chest. “I love you so much,” she whispers.

Daryl squeezes the soft curve of her voluptuous hip with one hand while he keeps his crossbow slung over his shoulder with the other. “I love you, too,” he whispers back. “C’mon. Let’s go get us some books.”

Lucy grins at him before she goes to back up the empty rig with the trailer facing the front door of the library. It takes a few minutes, since driving the damn thing is terrifying even at less than five miles per hour. There are a few dozen zombies at the library who must’ve spontaneously amplified during business hours, most of them sitting in front of the dead screens of the computers; they all play possum until they smell food. Lucy stabs the undead librarian at the circulation desk in the head before she does the same to the rotting woman in a kitschy cardigan at the reference desk. Daryl shoots the zombies at the computers until his quiver of arrows is empty, and draws his knife before he goes to kill the rest of them and refill it. Lucy spends the next several hours browsing the stacks and evaluating the information from the books in the nonfiction section because as much as she wants to hoard all of the fiction left in the world, she knows the how-to books are going to help her and the people who put her in power survive and thrive.

Daryl gets the platform truck Glenn stole from the Home Depot before he starts hauling books out to the rig and loads them up. Lucy has to force herself to stop watching the lean muscles in his sinewy arms bulge and flex every time he lifts something. It’s been a month and some change since they started having sex, but that makes the _want_ so much worse because she knows how good sex with Daryl is. Lucy knows exactly how it feels to have all of his quiet strength aimed at her pleasure with the precision of a bolt hitting a bullseye dead center, and just thinking about that is enough to get her wet these days.

 _Okay_ , Lucy thinks as she leans back against one of the bookshelves in the stacks and shuts her eyes as she exhales a soft whoosh of air, _I need to either jump his bones or take a cold shower because having sex in our room is not an option since I found out that everyone can hear us_ —

“Hey,” Daryl says before he puts one hand on the shelf next to her head as she opens her eyes and tilts her chin up with the other. “What’s wrong?”

Lucy shakes her head. “Nothing,” she mumbles. “I was just thinking about how badly I want you to hold me down and fuck me until I can’t think anymore, is that something you might be into?”

Daryl exhales with enough force to flare his nostrils and kisses her hard enough to bruise instead of using his words to answer her question. Lucy smooths her hands up from his elbows to fondle the muscles in his upper arms while he pushes her up against the bookshelf with his body, her legs falling open to accommodate the press of his hips against hers out of habit. Daryl tugs the wide straps of her dress over her arms while his tongue curls around hers in hot strokes, turning the kiss filthy and deep. When he breaks the kiss to nip at her bottom lip, Lucy moans and digs her fingers into his shoulders. Daryl scoops her tits out of the cups of her pretty bra without bothering to undo the clasp and gives her a gentle squeeze before he flicks and swirls the rough pads of his thumbs over her nipples. “Gimme your hands,” he rasps.

Lucy bites her lip and lifts her hands up over her head. Daryl clenches his jaw and holds her gaze while he wraps one hand around both of her wrists and puts enough pressure into the hold to make her hips lurch so she grinds against him, the sensation diluted with the layers of their clothes in the way but still enough to make him growl low in his throat as his cock twitches and throbs because he can feel the heat of her.

“Keep ’em up,” he tells her, “just like that.”

Lucy squirms and grips the shelf behind her as Daryl hunches to kiss her neck, his skillful calloused fingers gently tugging and twisting at her nipples while he nibbles and sucks on the delicate skin of her throat.

“I know how wet ya’ can get just from me playin’ with your pretty tits,” Daryl says in a low drawl that feels hot and heavy on her ear. “Ya’ like it a little rough, ain’t that right?” he adds and pinches her nipples hard enough to make her moan so loudly that the high noise that falls out of her mouth is almost a scream. “Ya’ like me talkin’ dirty, too. Ya’ hate not bein’ in control, with one exception.”

Lucy can be fierce and forthright in the sack because her brutal efficiency doesn’t go away even when they’re in bed together, but what she craves the most is sex that makes her lose that carefully cultivated control of hers. Daryl knows her better now, knows exactly how to take her apart. It makes him want to give her everything, to show her that he’s worthy of the sweetness and light she brings into his life.

 _I was nothin’ before her_ , he thinks, _I wanna be somethin’ for her now_.

Lucy whimpers and scratches at the shelf even though her nails are bitten to the quick with every suck and bite he gives the hard pink nubs of her nipples. There’s so much he wants to do to her: he wants her on her knees looking up into his eyes while he fucks her pretty face and comes in her mouth, and then he wants to eat her out until his dick gets hard again; but they’ve been gone too long and soon the others are going to start trying to get through to them on the radio. If they’re radio silent, the shit is going to hit the fan.

Daryl groans and licks from the underside of her left breast into the hollow between them to taste her sweat before he shoves his hands up underneath her skirt and works her leggings down her thighs. Lucy wiggles one foot out of her boot and leggings to wrap as much of herself around him as possible with her hands still above her head and most of her clothes still on. Daryl undoes his fly and uses his thumb to pull her panties aside before he wraps his other hand around the base of his cock and rubs the head up from the bottom of her soaking wet slit to her swollen clit.

Lucy slaps both of her hands over her mouth to muffle the scream that blooms in her throat when he thrusts all the way inside her in one rough stroke and shifts his hips so his pubic bone grinds against her clit just hard enough to make her go taut as a bowstring in between him and the bookshelf.

Daryl hunches to nuzzle her neck and sinks his teeth in as he bottoms out inside her again. “You’re fuckin’ perfect,” he grits out. “You know that?”

Lucy moves her hips to give as good as she gets and puts her hands on his face to pull him into another kiss, with teeth. Daryl braces himself with one hand on the bookshelf and it shakes with every thrust until she gasps into his mouth and exhales a high noise through her nose as she comes, falling apart at the seams. Lucy clenches around him like a vice and he keeps rubbing his pubic bone against her clit to make her come again, and again, and again before his orgasm hits him like a sucker punch and he slips out of her as his knees give out from under him.

Daryl huffs and puffs as she wobbles on her feet and fumbles with her cane. When she taps her earpiece to turn it back on, she winces and rolls her eyes as Nico yells at her on the other end for not checking in sooner.

“I’m okay,” Lucy informs her breathlessly, “actually, scratch that. I’m fucking perfect.”


	30. We Hold On

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) This became a stealth _Leverage_ crossover because I was rewatching while I was plotting the sequel to this fic, one thing led to another until I couldn’t imagine rewriting the story any other way, and here we are. I also blame **TheRedshirtWhoLived** for enabling me, and **auburn** for making me want to think of a way to save Andre because it’s bogus that mothers in _The Walking Dead_ either die or have to canonically lose their children in order to obtain badassery.
> 
> (2) I’m postulating that the zombie apocalypse happened in the aftermath of _Leverage_ 2x03 (“The Order 23 Job”), because it fits in with the canon timelines of both shows and because the irony of the team faking an outbreak for a con only to end up stranded in the deep South during the zombie apocalypse was hilarious to me in a horribly ironic sort of way.
> 
> (3) Carl mentions that the group stayed in storage units during the winter in _The Walking Dead_ 3x01 (“Seed”). I ran with that plot point and made it better, like I do.
> 
> (4) I’m going to start chronicling the year this story is set in using ZA (Zombie Apocalypse) as opposed to CE (Common Era) once we get through year zero of the zombie apocalypse that occurs on the show (i.e. 2010 CE). 1 ZA is 2011 CE, just to keep it simple.

**In a few weeks I would fall,**  
**for the first time, in love, that man waiting**  
**patiently in my future like a red leaf**  
**on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty**  
**that asks to be noticed. How was I to know**  
**it would begin this way: every cell of my body**  
**burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me**  
**a nimbus of light that would carry me**  
**through the days? How when he found me,**  
**weeks later, he would find me like that,**  
**an ordinary woman who could rise**  
**in flame, all he would have to do**  
**is come close and touch me.**

Dorianne Laux, “Fast Gas”

* * *

_Zreaks of Nature_  
**Part 2**  
Something for Nothing  
**Vol. V**  
_Something to Fear_  
**Chapter 30**  
We Hold On

* * *

_Sunday, 31 October 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 141._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_Gimme Shelter, Inc._

* * *

It’s Halloween when the hotel gets overrun by a shambling horde of zombies that has risen from a watery grave, if the bloating of the corpses is any indication. Lucy has been making the group run evacuation drills twice a week for almost two months, and that finally pays off at the eleventh hour.

“I told you so!” Lucy shouts at Rick as she drives the big rig full of boxes of books meticulously wrapped in acid-free paper and stored in waterproof, airtight, shockproof plastic containers into the night, “I fucking called it!”

Daryl snorts and rides his bike ahead of the convoy with a rev of the engine he converted to run on waste oil. Rick has been lowkey questioning Lucy’s authority ever since they elected her to lead instead of him. While his efforts haven’t been intentionally malicious, he obviously has some internalized misogyny he should be unlearning because he never undermined Hershel like that back at the farm before the older man relinquished any claim he had to leadership by right of the land they were on and let him call the shots. It’s pretty damn satisfying to know his girl was right all along, even if that means they’ve got to relocate again.

There’s a storage facility in Peachtree City aptly called Gimme Shelter, Inc. with self-storage units ranging from five-by-ten to ten-by-twenty feet, and some of the units were climate controlled before the power grid failed. Lucy, Kate, Nico, Gilda, Gert, Glenn, and Maggie swept the facility to find the backup generator in case the group needed somewhere else to stay in the event the inn got overrun. Nico parks the server rig in front of the building and grabs a cannister of gas from the back of the blue truck before she goes to fill up the generator. It’s warm enough for them to sleep in the storage units without power, but they’re going to need the option of plugging in space heaters to keep themselves from freezing to death if they spend the winter here.

Lucy finds a set of keys in the front office and opens the interior storage units one by one while the others wait outside to guard the convoy. Daryl brings his crossbow and shoots the zombies in the halls before they get close enough to smell the immunity on her and shuffle off this mortal coil. When they’re halfway down one of the hallways, something wails.

Daryl narrows his eyes and stops in his tracks. “Was that a baby?” he whispers.

Lucy shrugs, one-shouldered. “Let’s find out,” she whispers back.

When she opens the ten-by-twenty-foot storage unit at the back end of the hallway, her eyes go wide at the sight in front of her: a pale statuesque blonde woman surrounded by wooden boxes holding a brown-skinned baby boy, and a black man in bed with sweat beading on his forehead while he tries and fails to sweat out a fever.

Daryl flicks his gaze to the dying man in the bed and points his crossbow at the woman. “Was he bit?” he asks.

“No,” the blonde woman says, “he wasn’t. Please help us.”

There’s something off about her intonation, but underneath the blatantly obvious manipulation in her voice is real urgency; she isn’t holding the baby in her arms like she knows how to handle an infant, especially one that can’t stop crying. It’s clear that she’s overwhelmed.

“What’s your name?” Lucy asks. “What happened to him?”

“I’m Parker,” the blonde woman says, deliberately not giving away her last name. “This is Alec Hardison,” she cocks her head at the man in the bed, “and his nephew Andre. I went out looking for supplies yesterday. Hardison took Andre outside for a walk and when I came back, they were sick. There was a mini-horde that came through here yesterday, but they weren’t bitten or scratched.”

Lucy ducks her head and nods before she taps her earpiece. “Amy,” she says, “bring me three blood collection kits and a catheter small enough for an infant. I know we have a few somewhere, the Project C. U. R. E. rig we found had them. Kate, get two units of blood out of the fridge in the trailer.”

“If they’re infected,” Parker says hopelessly, “you can’t do anything for them.”

Daryl lowers his crossbow. “Wanna bet?” he mutters.

“Yes,” Lucy says as Kate and Amy come running down the hall, “I can.”

“How?” Parker asks.

“I’m immune to the zombie virus,” Lucy informs her, “my blood can work as a cure for people who’ve been infected. I’ve had my friend Amy,” she glances back at the fledgling surgeon, “draw at least two units of blood from me once a week in case of this contingency.”

“Seriously?” Alec rasps.

“You’re awake,” Amy says as she walks over to the bed, “that’s good. Give me your arm.”

Lucy plops the units of her blood on top of the blankets by his feet as Kate moves into position to shoot any zombies that shamble into the hallway. “You’re lucky they weren’t exposed to the virus before now,” she murmurs before she turns to look at Parker. “I need a sample of your blood, too.”

Parker narrows her eyes at the librarian and hunches her shoulders like she wants to give herself a hug. “How will that help?” she wants to know.

Lucy shifts her weight onto her cane and leans back against the doorway—it’s obvious this woman doesn’t trust people willy-nilly, but that’s okay. All they have left in the world is time, and each other. “Well,” she says, “it won’t help your friend or his nephew, but it’ll tell me whether or not you’re at risk of infection too. There are two strains of the zombie virus that we’ve encountered so far: one is waterborne and most of the people who survived are infected with the latent form of that strain, and the other is airborne. According to the data I’ve collected in the past three months, people infected with the latent viral strain are less vulnerable to the airborne infection. There’s another girl in our group, and she was exposed to the airborne strain of the virus like I’m assuming your friend and his nephew were yesterday. I transfused her seventy days ago, and she has been replicating my superior immunoresponse to the airborne strain of the virus ever since.”

“When she says ‘superior,’” Daryl cuts in, “she means ‘not a viral hemorrhagic fever that burns you out and kills you dead.’”

“It makes them immune,” Parker says and a sharp edge of hope creeps into the cadence of her voice, “permanently?”

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “blood from a transfusion only stays in your system for about a week so I think it’s safe to say Beth is permanently immune at this point.”

“I’ll give you whatever you want,” Parker tells her in a deadly serious hushed tone, “just save them.”

Alec grins at her, with teeth. “I love you, too,” he says.

Lucy glances at Daryl and smiles as she taps her earpiece again. “Rick,” she says, “a horde came through here yesterday. I want you to take Glenn, Morgan, and T-Dog and sweep the perimeter to take out any stragglers.”

Alec tries to sit up and eyes her with the look of feverish evaluation as Amy starts transfusing Andre, who fusses and wails so loudly that everyone in the storage unit winces. “You a scientist or something?” he asks.

“I’m a librarian,” Lucy clarifies, “my knowledge of immunology and epidemiology comes from being immunocompromised and living with an autoimmune disease for almost a decade pre-apocalypse. I’m in remission now, though. I got most of the information my research is based on from a scientist at the C. D. C. in Atlanta before he killed himself. I’ve been doing case studies on myself,” she props her cane against the wall and rolls up her sleeves to reveal the scars on her arms, “and everyone I’ve treated using my blood so far. I’m planning on finding a lab somewhere and synthesizing a vaccine eventually to create a more permanent solution.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Alec says.

“Can we come?” Parker asks hesitantly.

Lucy smiles at her shyly. “Sure,” she says and glances at one of the boxes that stands open against the wall behind the blonde. “Wait,” she says as she eyeballs the painting of a thief pretending to read someone’s palm and stealing the ring on his finger, “is that a Caravaggio?”

Parker grins at her. “Yeah,” she says proudly. “I stole it back in 2003,” she clarifies and holds up the watch she lifted off Amy out of habit when she handed Andre to her before she adds, “did I mention I’m a thief?”

* * *

_Monday, 1 November 2010 CE._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 142._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_Gimme Shelter, Inc._

* * *

Parker gives Amy back her watch before the others move the mattresses and bedding they collected over the past two months out of the rigs and into the storage units. After spending four months alone in the post-apocalyptic wasteland with a baby and each other, it has become apparently to Parker that she can’t function without a team anymore—and that she doesn’t want to live in a world without Alec. These people saved his life and that doesn’t mean Parker is going to give their whole group the benefit of the doubt, but it buys them some goodwill.

Lucy seems too honest for her own good, and she has a shrewd look in her gray eyes that reminds Parker of Nate at his sharpest. Daryl is wary and watchful in a way that reminds Parker of herself, of bad foster parents and scars that never had a chance to heal. Rick is a cop, and Parker distrusts him on principle. Morgan reminds Parker of Eliot, with the telltale way he holds himself with solid military precision and keeps his eye out for the kids in the group. Glenn is kind and a bit of a geek, and as soon as Alec wakes up from his nap she thinks he might be able to make a new friend. There’s nobody in the group who reminds her of Sophie, because the grifter was one of a kind.

“Where are y’all from?” Rick asks as Carol plates scrambled eggs and Morgan fries strips of bacon in a portable battery-operated grill and puts aside the waste oil so Daryl can fill up the tank on his bike later.

“Alec had family here,” Parker says instead of answering that question for herself, “he and his brother Mike lived with their Nana in Atlanta. We were at the refugee center with Andre, Mike, his girlfriend Michonne, and his friend Terry before they…” she turns to look at Lucy, “…what did you call it? Amplified?”

“Yup,” Lucy says as she sprinkles salt on her hash browns, “the airborne virus causes spontaneous viral amplification without an infection vector like a bite or a scratch.”

Parker nods. “We were watching Andre because Mike wanted to get high while Michonne went out looking for supplies,” she continues. “We took Andre and ran when the refugee center got overrun. I don’t know if Michonne made it out alive.”

“Michonne,” Rick says and shakes his head, “that’s one hell of a name.”

Lucy snorts. “It’s French,” she informs him, “from the surname Michon, derived from Hebrew. It means ‘a gift from God.’”

“God has a sick sense of humor,” Daryl quips.

* * *

_Thursday, 6 January 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 208._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_Gimme Shelter, Inc._

* * *

Lucy spends the first two weeks of winter in bed, and not in the fun way. It snows in sporadic falls and flurries through most of November and December, and the cold is hell on her arthritic joints even though she doesn’t have inflammatory sediment in her blood anymore. Daryl brings her things like Dr. Pepper and books to make her feel better while she maps out supply runs using a drone Alec built to keep track of the hordes that aren’t frozen yet.

On the bright side, living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland means they don’t have to pay a power bill so they can keep their heaters on all night and every day. On the darker side, freezing the zombies doesn’t seem to kill—or re-kill—them because the virus can live in ice. Which is new information that might prove Lucy’s hypothesis about how the virus got into the water supply: because global warming caused glaciers in the arctic to melt and the virions were trapped in the ice until that happened, but knowing she could be right about that isn’t going to help her cure the disease any sooner.

Daryl goes to keep watch the morning of his forty-second birthday and comes back to their storage unit to find Lucy fully dressed in a black dress under a fleece-lined leather jacket, two pairs of fuzzy knee socks on top of her floral print leggings, and snow boots. When he kisses her soft and deep and slow, she slips her left hand into the back pocket of his jeans and snatches the bandana he always carries around. Daryl breaks the kiss and squints at her, scrutinizing.

Lucy folds the bandana into a thin strip and smiles at him. “How much do you trust me?” she asks.

“With my life,” Daryl says without hesitation, “you should know that much by now.”

Lucy smiles wider and takes his hand in hers. “I do,” she tells him shyly, “I trust you, too. Let’s go.”

* * *

_Thursday, 6 January 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 208._  
_Carrolton, GA;_  
_Treetop Archery._

* * *

Daryl lets her put the bandana over his eyes and blindfold him in the passenger seat of a rig with a trailer that hasn’t been filled with supplies yet. When she parks the semi-truck and unties the bandana for him, he gives her a bruising kiss because he trusts her with his life but sensory deprivation freaks him the fuck out. Lucy kisses him back gently, all sweetness and light. Daryl breaks the kiss and pulls away before he opens his eyes to look at her. “Where the hell are we?” he wants to know.

Lucy grins and points through the windshield. “I remember you said you needed more arrows but making them is a pain in the ass because you can’t go out looking for sticks and feathers with all of the snow on the ground,” she informs him. “So: happy birthday. I found you an archery store.”

Daryl kisses her again before he gets out of the rig and goes around to her side to help her down so she doesn’t hurt her ankle in the process. “So this is what you were doin’ yesterday,” he deduces once he notices the distinct lack of zombies in the area.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound, “my girls and I cleared it out. I know you like using the undead for target practice, but I thought you would like not being in grave danger for once in our lives even better. Pun intended.”

Daryl snorts and holds the door to keep it open while she shuffles inside. Lucy catches sight of a poster of a scantily clad blonde in camo pants and a black pushup bra holding a compound bow incorrectly with arrows sticking out of her back pocket and rolls her eyes. Daryl slings an arm around her shoulder to give her a squeeze and nuzzle her hair before he goes to find new arrows.

Lucy shuffles over to a rack of left-handed model compound bows hanging from the ceiling and uses her cane to knock one down before she adjusts its draw length to suit her.

Daryl watches her nock an arrow on the string with interest. “Ya’ know how to use that?” he wants to know.

Lucy draws back the bowstring and turns to shoot at the scantily clad blonde on the poster, the arrow puncturing the cheek of her camouflage-clad ass as the bowstring snaps back against the leather of her jacket. “Yup,” she deadpans.

Daryl whistles as she goes to yank the arrow out of the wall. “Ya’ never told me ya’ knew how t’ shoot,” he says.

“I don’t,” Lucy clarifies, “I’ve been out of practice for nine years and I used to shoot with a right-handed draw.”

Daryl nods and fills a quiver with arrows as she hobbles over to him with her cane in the crook of her elbow and the bow in her hand. “Hell of a lucky shot,” he says in a low drawl that makes her blush from her ears to the hollow between her breasts.

Lucy shrugs. “I did ballet from age six to nine,” she informs him, “gymnastics from age nine to twelve, fencing and Tae Kwon Do from age twelve to fifteen, aikido and archery from age fifteen to eighteen. I saved my allowance for a bow, and I couldn’t afford a target for a few months after that so I shot at hay bales in the backyard that my mom bought to cover her garden beds during the winter so the seeds and bulbs wouldn’t die. I started an archery club in high school, but then…” she holds up her right hand in its brace, “…this happened. I got caught up in my depression for a while and then I was in college and I never had time or the spoons to teach myself how to shoot with a left-handed draw.”

Daryl smiles crookedly at the thought of teenage Lucy shooting at hay bales. “Until now,” he observes.

“Nothing can stop me now,” Lucy murmurs as she adjusts her grip on the compound bow, “not time, not money, not fear. I’m not afraid of the future anymore,” she adds shyly, “because loving you has made me stronger.”

Daryl swallows hard as his heart constricts horribly in his chest. “I love you too,” he tells her softly.

* * *

_Tuesday, 1 March 1 ZA._  
_Global Outbreak: Day 262._  
_Peachtree City, GA;_  
_Gimme Shelter, Inc._

* * *

Amy draws blood from everyone at the beginning of every month so Lucy can observe the symbionts in their systems to see if the latent viral strain is mutating; it hasn’t yet, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. After she brings the blood to the storage unit they’ve set up with basic lab equipment like a microscope and a minifridge, she stays to watch Lucy observe the blood and help record her findings. When the librarian abruptly stands up with a scrape of her chair against the linoleum floor, Amy starts to panic before she catches sight of the smile on her face.

“Holy eureka, Batman!” Lucy tells her. “I think we have a breakthrough.”

Amy eyes the glass slide under the microscope and frowns at the number she wrote in one corner with a Sharpie. “Wait,” she says, “that’s Daryl’s sample.”

Lucy nods and offers her a petri dish. “Go find him,” she says, “and tell him that I need him to spit in this so I can test a theory.”

Amy scrunches up her face in disgust. “Daryl’s your boyfriend,” she points out, “you should be the one who asks him to spit in the specimen container.”

“Okay,” Lucy shrugs as ekes the _oh_ sound out into an _ooh_ as she holds up her hands in mock surrender and stims by spinning the petri dish in between her fingers, “I’ll get a sample of his saliva and you can tell everyone that I just found a definitive way to cure the most infectious disease in human history.” At that, she tucks the petri dish in the messenger bag slung over her shoulder and shuffles out of their makeshift lab. “Go.”

After she checks the sample of his saliva and records her findings in her notebook, Lucy shuffles out into the hallway where everyone is waiting. “Daryl’s immune,” she informs them all. “I made him immune. With sex.”

“What,” Rick says flatly.

“How is that possible?” Lori wants to know.

“Immunoglobulin A,” Amy says as comprehension dawns.

Lucy nods again, a sharp descent of her chin. “IgA antibodies are in your mucous membranes,” she explains, “they’re in your tears, your saliva, your sweat, your genital secretions. We know the latent HZV-A virus can be sexually transmitted. It makes perfect sense that immunity can be transmitted the same way through exposure over an extended period of time.”

Daryl squints at her, scrutinizing. “So you’re sayin’ I’ve been exposed t’ your immunity since the first time I kissed ya’,” he deduces.

Lucy nods a third time, for the charm. “Which, over the past six months of repeated exposure, has given you the ability to replicate my immunoresponse,” she clarifies, “because as far as I can see from the sample I got from you just now, you’re making antibodies on your own and you’re immune to both strains of the virus. When I looked at your blood, I saw paratopes that indicated you were infected with the airborne virus in addition to the latent waterborne strain and now you’re not infected with either viral strain. I think you were fighting the airborne virus off last month.”

“Only we thought I just had the flu that was goin’ around,” Daryl murmurs.

“Yup,” Lucy says and pops the _p_ sound.

“Okay,” Alec says. “So what does all of that mean for your research?”

“It means that my adaptive immunity is transferrable,” Lucy says. “I need to monitor Daryl by taking regular saliva and blood samples for a few months, but if his immunity is permanent then I’ll have a definitive way to make a vaccine and cure the zombie virus.” At that, she smiles in the innocuous way that doesn’t show her teeth. “It means we can save what’s left of the world.”


End file.
